7 ChatGPT prompts for Legal Professionals in 2024

From court documents being moved to digital formats to the advent of AI in legal research, a lot has changed. What does it mean for legal professionals? And how can you use AI to make legal work more efficient?

Court dates, client meetings, legal research, paperwork – the list goes on for legal professionals. Even with the billable hour model, legal professionals seem to be constantly stretched thin.

Enter GPT-4. You might be skeptical - and rightly so. AI and law? Sounds like an unlikely pairing.

In today's post, I'll share 15 specific prompts you can use with a tool like GPT-4, tailored specifically for the legal profession. These prompts are designed to help with everything from drafting legal documents and contracts, finding relevant case law, and communicating with clients.

In essence, these prompts can help turn GPT-4 into your legal assistant, freeing up more of your time for the parts of the job that require a human touch.

Issues faced by lawyers and how ChatGPT can help?

Let's talk about the major challenges faced by law professionals. Chat GPT can help as an assistant and help in mitigating these challenges.

Legal Research & Document Review: Lawyers often spend significant amounts of time conducting legal research. Need to understand what is written in 10 pages of legal document? ChatGPT can quickly scan and summarize large volumes of legal texts, case law, and legislation.

Drafting Legal Documents: Creating legal documents, contracts, and letters can be labor-intensive. ChatGPT can help generate drafts based on given parameters, thus saving time. Though the prompts written by ChatGPT will be very generic, and you might have to re-do it entirely, it gives you a headstart.

Client Communication: Drafting and responding to client emails can take up a large part of a lawyer's day. ChatGPT can draft initial responses or create email templates for common queries.

Meeting Preparation: Preparing for meetings and court appearances requires a lot of work, including preparing notes, arguments, and more. ChatGPT can help by preparing initial drafts or bullet-point summaries.

Legal Education: Keeping up-to-date with new laws, rules, and regulations is essential but time-consuming. ChatGPT can provide summaries and key points of new legal updates in a digestible format.

Legal Opinions: Writing legal opinions involves careful thought and precision. ChatGPT can help by providing an initial draft based on the information given, which the lawyer can then review and edit.

An important point to note is ChatGPT is not a legal expert. Whatever content is provided by the platform should be used as a starting point and not as a final material.

7 ChatGPT prompts for law professionals

#1. Tracking changes in the law

ChatGPT can save a lot of time searching for legislation and its changes. For example, we asked ChatGPT to highlight the most significant changes to The Immigration and Nationality Act (1952). In response, we received a list of substantial changes that have been made to the INA over the years:

• Immigration Act of 1965;
• Refugee Act of 1980;
• Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986;
• Immigration Act of 1990;
• IIRAIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996);
• REAL ID Act of 2005;
• Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

It took less than 5 seconds to get an answer and without going to multiple websites too.

#2. Analyzing references and citations

Chat GPT can analyze all cases that cite specific statutes, regulations, or court rules.

For example, we asked the ChatGPT to name the most famous court cases that cite New Kids on the Block v. News America Pub., Inc.

Although this case is not famous or popular, other courts have used it as a precedent. It would take any lawyer quite a while to find this information. Chat GPT managed it quickly enough and called:

• White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (1992)
• Estate of Presley v. Russen (1995).
• Comedy III Prods., Inc. v. Saderup, Inc. (2001)

#3. Searching and analyzing case law

With the birth of the Internet, a lawyer's work has become much more manageable. There is no need to study thousands of pages and collections of case law in preparation for litigation. The Internet makes it possible to find the data you need in hours. Chat GPT has done that in just a few tens of seconds. So, we asked it: what case law should I use in the cases about trademark disputes? We got the needed answer with a few examples immediately:

• Polaroid Corp. v. Polarad Electronics Corp. (1961)
• Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc. (2003)
• Abercrombie & Fitch Co. v. Hunting World, Inc. (1976)
• Brookfield Communications, Inc. v. West Coast Entertainment Corp. (1999)

Also, the bot warned us that these are only some examples and the list is not exhaustive.

In addition, the legal theories according to these cases were named: Likelihood of Confusion, Dilution, Genericide, and Initial Interest Confusion, and a good analysis of these theories was given.

#4. Screening for research in legal scholarship and new legal theories

Improving knowledge in the legal field is relevant to any self-respecting lawyer. At the same time, it becomes more challenging. Therefore, you can use Chat GPT to save time on self-development issues. For example, we asked ChatGPT about some new legal theories. As you know, the knowledge of this AI language model is limited to September 2021. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn, for example, about Algorithmic Justice, a field of research about the possibility of applying algorithms to criminal justice (risk assessment tools).

#5. Drafting legal advice

Some legal advice can be pretty simple and does not require much research, but it takes a lot of time to create it. ChatGPT can streamline this process, all you have to do is enter all the necessary input data, and an answer will be generated faster than you can drink a cup of coffee. Such questions may include, for example, divorce, alimony, and some questions on damages.

#6. Drafting lawsuits and other procedural documents

Some procedural documents are simple and can even be drafted by artificial intelligence. However, document verification is required.

For example, we asked the ChatGPT to write an employment discrimination lawsuit in which a healthy 35-year-old woman was denied a job because she was pregnant. We provided no other information. In this case, ChatGPT used fictitious data when drafting the lawsuit. Again, this demonstrates the need to provide complete details and the context of the legal relationship to get a better result.

#7. Drafting contracts

Usually, a lawyer uses a contract he has already written for another client or drafts it for the first time. Why not use a project that ChatGPT can offer you? For example, we asked to write a non-compete agreement in the IT sphere. It completed the task without any significant flaws. In addition, the draft contract will be of higher quality if you tell the ChatGPT about the mandatory provisions and explain exactly its subject. You should make it a rule to check the proposed text in detail.

Can Chat GPT replace lawyers?

ChatGPT is a powerful tool that lawyers should learn to use in their work to save time and optimize workflow.

The speed at which ChatGPT can draft legal documents is unachievable for humans.

Interestingly, law firms have already begun incorporating the new experience of using artificial intelligence in their work with clients. Allen & Overy can be mentioned.

The introduction of new forms of legal technology is helping to find ways to improve the effectiveness of legal professionals, as noted in the 2020 Legal Trends Report.

As technology advances, so do client expectations. However, it's worth remembering that lawyers are personally responsible for their practices, so don't rely entirely on imperfect, evolving technology, which ChatGPT is, among others.

Even though ChatGPT can almost completely replicate human communication, it can still replace a lawyer in his work with legal documents, public authorities, and people only partially. We can explain it by flaws directly related to ChatGPT, which can be crucial in the practice of law.

Read More: 7 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT in Accounting 

Limitations of using ChatGPT for Legal Operations

Despite all the advantages of ChatGPT when appropriately used in legal practice, including drafting procedural documents and analyzing case law, its use also has some limitations.

The issue of legal expertise: ChatGPT is not a tool specifically designed for a lawyer. Therefore, you will be unable to get an accurate answer to your legal question as if a professional lawyer had generated the response.

Ethical issue: Confidentiality and security of data provided to a lawyer during a consultation or assignment is a significant issue in lawyer-client interaction. From an ethical perspective, the potential for ChatGPT to disclose sensitive data received increases concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in the practice of law. In addition, applying data privacy and security laws to text created by artificial intelligence remains an open question.

Lack of detail and understanding of context: ChatGPT needs help understanding the context in which the language is used and the task at hand when processing text. As a result, responses to legal queries are often incomplete and inaccurate, which can have unpredictable consequences if not adequately supervised by a legal professional.

The issue of prejudice: ChatGPT uses a wide variety of data for its training. Such data may have elements of subjectivity, injustice, inequality, discrimination, and myths. It can lead to biased responses, which can have ethical implications.

The issue of control: the process of making ChatGPT decisions is difficult to understand. The main feature of this process is a lack of transparency. Because of this, uncontrolled use of ChatGPT is impossible.

Because of the restrictions mentioned above on using ChatGPT by lawyers, we must recognize the need to use it only if there is human control based on human experience and legal expertise. Otherwise, no one can guarantee responses' accuracy, objectivity, and fairness.

Nanonets AI-based OCR for legal text extraction

Nanonets is an OCR software that leverages AI & ML capabilities to automatically extract unstructured/structured data from PDF documents, images, and scanned files. Unlike traditional OCR solutions, Nanonets do not require separate rules and templates for each new document type.

Using AI-driven cognitive intelligence, Nanonets can handle semi-structured and unseen document types while improving over time. While offering a great API & documentation for developers, the software is also ideal for legal teams with no prior knowledge or expertise with technology.

The benefits of using Nanonets over other automated OCR software go far beyond cost savings, accuracy, and scale. Nanonets additionally provide unique benefits that place them far ahead of the competition:

• A truly no-code tool
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• Works with custom data
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• Works with multiple languages
• Continuous learning
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Conclusion

ChatGPT is a tool and should be treated as such.

As you can see, the possibilities of using ChatGPT by legal professionals are vast, almost limitless. But artificial intelligence can make mistakes due to bias, a lack of understanding of the legal context, or an incomplete data set to produce the correct answer.

That is why excluding the legal professional entirely from the process is impossible.