Chatgpt misuse in the legal profession is spreading. First it was in New York, now Colorado Springs. lawyers - ChatGPT hallucinates. It is not a search engine. It's a language learning model. It spent the last few years scraping the internet to learn how we write and now is capable of mimicking humans to a pretty solid level. But, it does not analyze. It does possess the ability to think or develop arguments. When you ask it to provide a case or citations, it does not search PACER or some legal database. It takes you literally and it creates a case that supports the position you're asking it to support. Consider it a child that just wants to make you happy. It is not HAL 9000. It won't tell you, "I can't do that, Dave." It also implicates privilege issues when you put your work product into the ChatGPT interface. You don't know where your work is going and may not have a viable claim to an expectation of privacy. There are some things ChatGPT is good at - making writing more concise, for example. If you are interested in utilizing AI, there are law-specific products like Casetext, Part of Thomson Reuters 's Co-Counsel designed to assist. But, we attended a sales pitch for that product and they were unable to tell me whether they used dedicated server space at AWS or how they processed information and where it went. Be exceptionally cautious about what you plug into AI and how you used it. New York - Colorado Springs
Thought Leadership
Why Lawyers Must Be Wary of ChatGPT's Hallucinations
ChatGPT mimics human writing but invents cases and raises privilege risks — reasons for lawyers to use it cautiously.