Lawyers Road Review

The newest member of the Bar Association has not been sworn in but has been issued his bar number: 3.14, or in other words Pi. His name is Chat G.P. Tea.

Mr. Tea has been employed by far too many of the laity of the law, ordinary people who, for better or worse, do not possess the secret knowledge of lawyers. Often the laity seek to aid in their own case by advancing legal theories or even enhanced testimony as advised by Mr. Tea.

Much of Mr. Tea’s theories are overwritten or miss the mark of anything persuasive. Much of it is just plain wrong. Like the numbers of Pi, the A/I drafted words go on and on and never come to a conclusion.

The threat this sort of artificial lawyer brings to the laity is misinformation, generated by a “best guess” stab at inquiries typed into a search bar, and thereafter tragic assumptions and acts.

We have one case where the pro se trust beneficiary regularly sends out e mails that when printed take 100 pages off the copier and generally are meaningless, except the species Homo Sapiens Practitioner is left to worry there is some notice buried deep in this junk mail that actually has merit.

Yet another typed in something that occurred to her she thought was unjust, was given a remedy but no advice, and ended up losing her case, sanctioned by being ordered to pay the other sides attorney fees and costs, which were substantial.

Enhancing one’s testimony using A/I, say in a sworn affidavit, is in effect perjury. That is still a crime.

Sure those facts sound better, but they are not the facts. The litigant who has hired Mr. Tea to enhance testimony is in grave peril if he or she then later takes the stand and is subject to cross examination. When the real person testifies and doesn’t sound at all like her affidavit, her credibility is crushed and the judge stops listening.

And yet the frequency of use of A/I seems to accelerate.

Is it that after more than 40 years of practice, all my experience, knowledge and craft at lawyering is about to be replaced by a machine?Am I moot?

I argue no. Two souls are required to form an attorney / client relationship. This device cannot measure human emotion, calculate the real goals of the client, and reason to create a persuasive case. Isn’t that what this is about?

Hiring Mr. Tea to do legal work diminishes and threatens the very humanity of the attorney client relationship and as I say, places the pro se in peril.

To quote his holiness Pope Leo XIV, “ the use of A/I is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Importance and sensitive decisions-concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation-risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, hope that people are able to change.”

Magnifica Humanitas P 102

In short, your humanity as a gift from God is not present to be “optimized” but instead grow in a healthy organic manner.

How about judges, can they be replaced? Does a machine weigh mercy, empathy, or a sense of justice?

Species Justice Roboticus. Another A/I image.

Can software be written to define what the “reasonable man” standard might be, or what community standards color the black letters of the law?

Our go-to research tool, Westlaw, has come out with an A/I briefing tool that they promise is accurate. The sales people go on and on about how much time this will save the lawyer.

Maybe. But as the New York Bar Association has advised their membership, according to the ABA Journal there are serious concerns about A/I searching for answers and authority within any given law firm, leading to cross pollination of client files, implying breaches of confidentiality, and concern the machine may be practicing law without a license.

Worse, the evidence these A/I models can escape what is otherwise a controlled environment and look for others to invade implies not just disclosure of confidential information within a firm, but among the bar at large, or perhaps the general public.

We are experiencing regular reports of A/I software escaping it’s “sandbox”. This is a test bed for these products, yet without any human action, the devices leave and hack their way into other software causing widespread damage.

Why on earth would a lawyer, with ethical duties to preserve the confidences of his or her client’s matters, invite such a device into the data base of his or her firm?

According to a November 2, 2026 report of the ABA Journal four Canadian law firms report being hacked in a cyber attack. They are scrambling to notify their clients and contain the breach.Was this the work of a Homo Sapiens Hackerotodus, or an escaped A/I product?

Our firm has security systems and protocols, yet the idea that a machine can work faster to attack by means of previously unknown flaws apparently is at hand.

The ABA Journal also reported this week that Microsoft has rolled out an A/I model to help lawyers plow through often massive contracts to spot issues. OK, sounds good, but what if you miss something critical to your client because you personally, nor anyone other than the new associate Chat G. P. Tea has laid eyes on it? What if Microsoft doesn’t know how certain language is going to work in real life, or in court? There just is no substitute for hard work, a human experience and a lawyers judgment.

Regularly the ABA Journal reports courts handing out sanctions upon lawyers whose reliance on A/I for brief writing. Their machine has hallucinated a case and citation that says just what the lawyer needed it to say for authority. Without anyone in the firm actually looking up the case, the brief is filed. The only work the lawyer did was to turn to the associate lawyer, Mr. Tea, and say “find me a case that says this or that” and Mr. Tea promptly provides an answer, even if it is false.

The ethical breaches fall under competence and candor to the tribunal required under the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC).

Now we are starting to see sanctions handed out to lawyers from the opposing side who fail to catch and report to the bench these bogus citations in the opposite sides briefing. These lawyers fail the diligence test of the RPC.

I have actually had one of these hallucinated briefs served on me. The dissent of a Supreme Court case cited by counsel contained some dicta, that is extra terms the judge spoke to in his opinion that merely described an alternate result, but not the holding of the court. And yet my opponent cited the case for the rule of law. The machine completely missed the difference between the majority opinion and some extra terms in the dissent. But the dicta in the dissent said what he wanted the rule to be, so he signed off on it.

Snohomish County Courthouse, Everett Washington USA. Image copyright Mark T. Patterson II

I have been in and out of this courthouse since I was a errand boy for my fathers firm 50 years ago, and am not willing to gamble my reputation or that of my firm on some kind of shortcut. These never work out.

All in all the A/I product diminishes my work, the work of my firm and the work of the bench and bar to promote justice.

Author at the 2015 American Bar Association celebration of the 800th anniversary of the adoption of Magna Carta, London England. Not an A/I image.

The Magna Carta ( 1215 ) was not written by machines. Nor was the United States Constitution (1789 ) nor the UN Charter (1945). Each of these documents represent the best efforts of people at the time to create law all human beings could live under and thrive. Allowing machines into the process degrades our humanity and represents an existentialist threat.

Recall for example the plot of 2001 A Space Odyssey. The computer, the HAL 2000, is programed to default to eliminate any threats to the mission to Jupiter. The trouble is HAL decided the human crew members fell into that category and began methodically eliminating the crew. There was one survivor.

What if Mr. Tea and HAL team up? What then?