AI is a game changer for legal services consumers. We don't need to convince you of this. If you've used ChatGPT-4, you know what we are talking about. If you have yet to use ChatGPT-4 and are sceptical AI will soon be used ubiquitously by legal services consumers, likely eliminating a percentage of lawyer jobs, read these articles from organizations you trust: here, here, and here.
Primarily, AI will one day be in charge of the tedious things lawyers do on a computer—for example, legal document drafting.
Contrariwise, AI will not one day be in charge of what lawyers do in person.
For one, there won't be AI lawyers in courtrooms.
Second, AI lawyers won't sit in boardrooms handling transactions and other big-ticket decisions.
Third, AI lawyers won't judge, arbitrate or mediate any disputes.
At least for the next few years, lawyers who draft legal documents are safe.
We know the inherent problems with AI legal document drafting.
If you, a lawyer, have used ChatGPT-4 and prompted it to make you a legal document, you were underwhelmed and even aghast at how many mistakes the chatbot made.
It's no understatement to say AI must still improve at drafting legal documents before anyone's job is replaced.
AI-made legal documents omit important clauses, fail to account for local rules and otherwise hallucinate unenforceable legalese. When laws change either by jurisprudence or legislation, AI does not know about those changes. AI-generated content is created from what is already out there, with no ability to identify new rules or industry trends.
AI-generated legal documents made in 2023, particularly key documents like employment contracts that require airtight language, will likely be held void by a court in 2024.
However, this problem has a solution.
What if an AI was trained to create specific legal documents that were preprogrammed to include all crucial clauses, account for local rules, encompass rules changes and not hallucinate anything? Perhaps, at least for these specific documents, they would be "worth the paper they were written on".
For example, in Ontario, Canada, employment contracts should include, among other things, a termination clause that ensures the employee shall not receive anything less than minimum notice upon termination. Also, in Ontario, employment contracts must not include a non-competition clause, among other things.
Thus, if a lawyer could train and code an AI to make employment contracts in Ontario that included compliant termination clauses and did not include a non-competition clause, among many other things, then, hypothetically, the resulting AI-generated employment contract would be of the quality one could expect to replace lawyers.
goHeather has set out to create just this AI legal services solution: quality AI legal documents trained and programmed by a lawyer. In this way, very soon, a customer can come to goHeather's website to make an AI legal document, knowing that the AI-generated text will be sound.
What will set goHeather apart from ChatGPT is that the customer can't simply make any legal document using a prompt; they have to pick a document from a list of documents our lawyers have already fine-tuned.
We only promise to make some legal documents worldwide work with AI. First, we will focus on the ones used the most by consumers of HR legal services.
If all goes to plan, legal services consumers will save money. Legal documents that would have cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars will be free.
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Jeff is a lawyer in Toronto and he is a co-founder of goHeather. Jeff is a frequent lecturer on commercial and employment law and AI for law firms, and is the author of a commercial law textbook and various trade journal articles. Jeff is interested in business, technology and law.
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