ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within five days of its public release in November 2022, the chatbot amassed 1 million users. By January 2023, it had 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing app in history.
It’s clear that ChatGPT (and other generative AI tools like it) are poised to disrupt nearly every industry, including law. According to a 2023 survey by Thomas Reuters, 82% of lawyers think ChatGPT/generative AI can be applied to legal work, and 51% believe ChatGPT/generative AI should be applied to legal work.
But this is no reason to panic. Instead, lawyers should see ChatGPT as an opportunity to improve their business.
What is ChatGPT?
For those unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it’s basically a chatbot that can generate human-like text responses to nearly any question. For example, it can answer factual questions such as, “What is the capital city of Montenegro?” However, it can also generate creative output such as entire poems, essays, code, and more.
What makes ChatGPT different from other chatbots is the massive amounts of data it’s been trained on and the large language model (LLM) that powers it. These give it the ability to respond to complex queries and maintain ongoing conversations with users.
For lawyers, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to streamline workflows. Here are four ways you can leverage it:
1. Accelerate legal research
Lawyers spend a lot of time researching-sifting through documents to make their case.
ChatGPT can speed up this process by helping users find relevant information faster. It can quickly sift through case law, precedents, statutes, regulations, and other sources. All you have to do is tell it what to look for.
If ChatGPT can’t provide the answer, it can at least point you to relevant legal sources. It can also summarize long legal documents, so you can get the gist without reading the whole thing.
The obvious benefit here is time saved. By having ChatGPT do research for you, you free up time to take on more cases and generate more revenue.
2. Draft legal documents
Another task that lawyers spend a lot of time on is drafting documents-whether they be briefs, contracts, motions, letters, or something else.
Again, ChatGPT can help. For example, you can give it all the relevant facts and clauses to a case and then have it to turn them into a coherent brief.
Of course, you’ll need to carefully go over ChatGPT’s output to make sure it’s sound from a legal perspective. But at least you have something to start with. Say goodbye to writer’s block.
You can also use ChatGPT to review drafts for spelling, grammar, structure, and other mistakes.
3. Market legal services
Marketing can be a constant challenge for lawyers. But you need to do it to generate more business.
Luckily, ChatGPT can make this job easier. You can use it to brainstorm content ideas or even create marketing content. This includes blog posts, email campaigns, and social media posts. The goal is to drive traffic to your law firm’s website. The more eyes you have on your brand, the more business it will generate.
4. Improve customer service
Finally, ChatGPT can help with customer service. You may be juggling many clients, and keeping up with all of them at once can be challenging.
So why not have ChatGPT draft email replies? You can even tell it to write emails in a caring and understanding tone.
Another way to use ChatGPT is to integrate it into your website’s customer chatbot. That way, you can offer 24/7 support and never leave your customers (and potential customers) hanging.
Limitations of ChatGPT
As powerful as ChatGPT is, it’s not without limitations. Some that you should be aware of include the following:
- Knowledge cutoff date. ChatGPT was trained on data that existed in September 2021 and earlier. As a result, it is unaware of laws, events, and information that came out after that date.
- Potential bias. Some of the texts ChatGPT was trained on may contain bias. So its outputs may exhibit bias at times, too.
- Ability to produce inaccurate information. In some cases, ChatGPT provides inaccurate information due to limitations in its training data or user input errors.
- Not original. Despite its ability to generate new texts, ChatGPT may provide the same answer to other users. So its content won’t always be original.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, ChatGPT is a powerful tool that lawyers can use in a variety of ways to improve their business. Though the tool won’t ever replace lawyers altogether, it is changing the way lawyers work. Those who don’t adopt it may get left behind by those that do.
So start experimenting with ChatGPT today and let it take your business to the next level!