Yet Another ChatGPT Post…

It’s January 2023 and ChatGPT is all anyone is talking about.

And with good reason. ChatGPT has the potential to be a game-changer in so many industries, not least the legal profession.

In case you’ve been locked away in an underground bunker, ChatGPT is a language model chatbot developed by OpenAI, built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 language models to interact in dialogue form.

Simply put, ChatGPT uses AI to provide responses based on prompts submitted by the user.

Ask it any question, and you’ll get a scarily human response.

So, What’s All the Fuss about ChatGPT?

Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 to the general public, humans all over the world have been exploring possible applications of the technology.

From coding to de-bugging software programs, drafting literature to imitating Shakespeare, creating lyrics to writing music – anything seems possible.

There’s no doubt that the underlying technology powering ChatGPT will spur a wave of innovation, and ChatGPT (and AI more generally) will become part of daily life wherever there is internet connectivity.

How will ChatGPT impact lawyers?

What impact will all of this have on the practice of law?

Lawyers historically tend to be the slowest to adopt new tech and embrace change.

After all, law and risk-taking/innovation are old enemies and I’ve seen many articles and posts by lawyers pointing out a myriad risks associated with using ChatGPT.

They’re absolutely right to do so – ChatGPT definitely has its limitations. But that’s not to say that the tech doesn’t show immense promise, provided it’s used properly.

Like my high school hockey coach would say if I complained about my hockey stick: “The problem isn’t the tool – it’s the fool behind the tool.”

Once you accept ChatGPT’s limitations and focus instead on the things that work well, as a tool it seems to become far more powerful.

So, after a month of playing around with ChatGPT, I’ve complied this list of 7 ChatGPT prompts that I’ve found extremely useful and that every lawyer should start using.

7 ChatGPT Prompts Every Lawyer Should Start Using

1. “Draft an email”

Drafting emails is extremely tedious but sometimes unavoidable. Prompting ChatGPT to write simple emails can help remove some of the tedium.

I’ve found this prompt works well with simple emails asking to set up meetings, requesting status updates and (politely) asking my counterparts when I can expect comments on my agreements.

A word of caution though – I’ve found that ChatGPT can embellish or make up facts to include in emails. For that reason, stick to using it to draft simple, low-risk emails and always proof-read for accuracy.

The more information you include in your prompt, the better ChatGPT’s response will be.

Luckily, it’s spelling and grammar seems to be flawless.

Pro-tip: If the draft email sounds highly robotic and unlike anything you would ever send, prompt ChatGPT to rewrite the email in a more informal tone.

2. “Summarise this clause so a layperson can understand it”

Until the Plain Language Movement truly catches on, unnecessarily verbose and complicated legal drafting will continue to exist.

Luckily, ChatGPT seems to be pretty good at deciphering technical legal drafting and explaining it in a way that a non-legal person can understand.

Here’s an example of me asking it to summarise the “Liquidity Event” clause in the standard Y-Combinator SAFE Agreement:

Although I hadn’t given it information about any of the embedded defined terms, the explanation is pretty accurate.

I’ve found this prompt pretty useful whenever a non-legal colleague asks for an explanation of a clause in a contract.

ChatGPT saves you the time it takes to paraphrase the clause into non-legal speak, but also helps you sense-check whether you’ve understood the clause properly in the first place.

Most medium to large firms already use AI-enabled tools to help with the contract review ‘grunt work’ of due diligences, but GPT-powered tools could take this to the next level. The costs and time associated with due diligences and contract review could be significantly reduced.

I’m a little rueful that future generations of young lawyers probably won’t spend late nights poring over endless contracts.

Pro-tip: Use this prompt to sense-check your own drafting to make sure your drafting is clear enough, and captures your original intention.

3. “Act like my opposing counsel and provide counter-arguments”

This is undoubtedly my favourite prompt.

If you prepare for negotiations, one exercise you probably already do is to calculate your opposing lawyers’ potential counter-arguments to your points and try to prepare pre-baked responses.

ChatGPT can take the hard work out of it by giving you counter-arguments you might expect to face.

See the screenshot below. I asked ChatGPT to provide counter-arguments to a proposal about a cap on my client’s liability for loss suffered as a result of data breaches.

The counter-arguments seem compelling on the face of it, although they’re not bullet-proof and in some cases not entirely accurate (e.g. point 4 doesn’t pass the laughter test for me).

I don’t think this detracts from the utility of the prompt though.

Humans don’t make perfect arguments all the time either and the main benefit is to help you to think about how you might respond to certain counter-arguments.

In any event, I’d be pretty fearful for my job if I lost a legal argument to a robot…

Pro-tip: You can submit follow-up responses to ChatGPT’s counter-arguments and prompt it to respond to your responses. Admittedly, this has its limits. After a while, ChatGPT simply repeats its initial arguments over and over. Although, that’s not unlike how some negotiations go in my experience.

4. “Prepare an agenda for my meeting with Client X”

Agendas are useful to keep meetings focused and on track, but a pain in the butt to prepare.

Tell ChatGPT what you’d like to cover in your meeting, ask it to prepare an agenda – et voilà!

Again, you should always proof-read before sending this out. There are some agenda items included that ChatGPT anticipated I’d want (without me asking).

There are more valuable uses of your time than preparing agendas and ChatGPT’s response is certainly good enough for me.

5. “Suggest changes to change the tone”

An insecurity many lawyers have is “sounding too much like a lawyer”.

For reasons unknown, we’re trained to write and speak in a particularly formalistic manner that just doesn’t fly with the rest of the working world.

The result?

We waste hours drafting and re-drafting emails hoping to get the point across clearly, while not sounding like an extract from a Law Journal.

Here’s an example of a fictional, overly verbose email response to another lawyer that I asked ChatGPT to rewrite in a more informal tone:

Pro-tip: It might take a couple of attempts to get the tone just right – as illustrated above. Again, the more information you give ChatGPT, the better the response.

6. “Draft an x agreement”

This is a controversial one.

Let me say upfront – I’m not recommending you use ChatGPT to generate agreements.

You should always apply your mind to your drafting, and consider the specific risks and circumstances that you’re drafting for.

That said, it’s a good idea to do some planning before you start drafting anything (especially an agreement you’ve never drafted before).

Taking the time to figure out what you need to draft beforehand significantly reduces your total drafting time and the likelihood of having to do re-drafts.

Prompting ChatGPT to draft an agreement can give you an agreement skeleton, serving as a rough indication of what clauses to include in your agreement.

See this example, where I asked ChatGPT to draft an advisor sales development representative agreement:

Not all of the clauses were relevant to me. However, ChatGPT did give me a reasonably good guide on what I might need to include in the agreement. This helped me plan my drafting.

To reiterate – it’s not a good idea to wholesale copy and paste any legal provisions generated by ChatGPT.

You have no reference of which jurisdiction the clause is appropriate for, nor where ChatGPT sourced the clause.

Pro-tip: Use this prompt to help with planning your drafts. Just don’t rely on it to copy and paste clauses into your agreements.

7. “Find me the case reference for…”

Know the case name, but can’t find the reported case reference? ChatGPT can help:

ChatGPT’s search capability is arguably less impressive than some of its other applications.

It might have been quicker for me to Google the case name, but I’d still have to read through search results to find the case reference – a marginal gain.

A key limitation of GPT3 is that its knowledge base is limited to events before 2021. This means ChatGPT won’t help you find anything more recent than that – for now.

It does also struggle with lesser-known cases that are not reported as extensively on the Internet.

Pro-tip: Submit a follow-up prompt asking ChatGPT to summarise the case, or even give you the ratio decidendi (legal reasoning) of the case.

Where to from here?

There’s no doubt that if used correctly, ChatGPT can provide significant marginal gains to lawyers wanting to reduce the amount of time they spend on low-impact, high-volume, repeatable tasks.

Having your time freed up to do more impactful tasks might be the key to establishing a successful and sustainable legal practice.

Given the legal profession’s inertia with embracing technology, it seems to me that early adopters of this tech will reap the biggest rewards.

There’s no reason not to experiment and figure out for yourself how ChatGPT could change your practice.

Let me know what you think, and how you’re using ChatGPT in the comments!

A word of caution:

I would not recommend submitting any confidential, privileged, sensitive or personal information to ChatGPT. The data privacy implications and risks are still being figured out, and the safest approach is always to anonymise or remove this information from your prompts.