How to Use ChatGPT to Ruin Your Legal Career

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Imagine calling up your lawyer to see how the case is going and finding out he's now in bigger legal trouble than you ever were.

Imagine paying a lawyer thousands of dollars and they use ChatGPT. I'd sue them in addition to the original lawsuit to get my money back.

I'm a medical student and one day the residents and I used ChatGPT for fun. I cannot even articulate how bad it is at medicine. So many random diagnoses and blatant wrong information. I'm not surprised the same is true for law

Public service announcement from your friendly librarian: DO NOT ASK FOR CITATIONS FROM CHATGPT. The citations are likely imaginary and you will only waste yours and the librarian's time. And you WILL be made fun of among the staff. (Worse than this happening in legal settings is this happens in medical settings 😑)

This will be used as reference in law schools for decades to come. Ethics professors have just gained hours of material for presentations.

Asking Chat GPT to validate its own text is like asking a child if they're lying. What do you expect?

Man, my blood ran cold when I heard that the Judge himself had contacted the circuit from which the fake decision had purportedly come. I was a clerk at the Federal Circuit from '15 to '17, and I remember once when Chief Judge Prost had discovered a case that had been cited in support of a contention that it did not actually support, she really let the citing attorney have it in oral arguments. That was the scariest scene I ever saw as a new lawyer, and that was worse than I could have imagined, so I cannot even begin to conceive how bad it was for these plaintiff attorneys. Side note, Chief Prost was a fantastic and fair judge, and a very nice and kind person, but the righteous wrath of a judge catching an attorney trying to hoodwink her/him is about the most frightening thing for a lawyer.

As a paralegal, this whole case got under my skin in the worst way. From the unverified citations, to the fact that he didn't know what the Federal Register is, to lying to the judge. If I did even one of the things they did on this case, I would throw myself at the mercy of my boss, because there's no way in hell I would even let him sign something that wasn't perfect, I sure as shit wouldn't file it.

Honestly, even if ChatGPT didn't exist, it really seems like these lawyers would've still done something stupid and incompetent that would've gotten them sanctioned

I'm a law student, got tired of searching for cases to reference that matched a very specific criteria, 3 years of looking through Jade and CaseLaw is like trying to find the holy grail, tried using ChatGPT to find the cases to give myself a break, the absolute confidence that it had when giving me a list of non-existant cases is something I aspire to have, I have never gone from happiness to hopelessness as quick as I did when I looked to see if they were real

I finally have confirmation if the background is a greenscreen. Seeing him pull a book from behind him made me happy

The fact that "bogus" is apparently a legal term makes me very happy.

As a Machine Learning Engineer, seeing Devin explain Chatbots better than 99% of the people in the world who think it's magic or something made me tear up

As a computer engieener with a deep love of law, it drives me crazy that they even tried to do this. ChatGPT does not give you facts, it gives you fact shapped sentences. Chatgpt does not fact check, it only checks that the generated text has gramatical sense

I’ve never worked directly with a judge, but I’m going to guess that making a judge research several cases that you refuse to research yourself (not to mention the AI crap) is going to make them very very angry.

I’m not a lawyer, I’m just here for the show, but believe me, when you got to the judge asking ”Were you really on vacation?” I burst out laughing. Don’t lie to the judge, man!

Having ChatGPT write the argument with the fake citations was incompetence. Having ChatGPT generate the cases and submitting them as if they were real was malice. I say they should both be heavily sanctioned, if not outright disbarred.

Being asked as not only an adult but an adult lawyer if something is a book is embarrassing at the highest level

A recent survey of ChatGPTs performance when it came to math was published and it really illustrates why you shouldn't try to rely on these things to answer questions for you. It went from answering the test question correctly more than 98% of the time to barely 2% in a matter of months. Not only that, it has in some cases started to refuse to show its work (aka why it is giving you the answer it is giving you).