By Kathryn Keefer
The quick answer is yes. A human attorney is well worth the time and money. With various AI tools emerging, services that presume to provide AI legal assistance are exponentially becoming more popular. Many small businesses, start-ups, and even large companies have started using AI as their primary source of legal help. Whether it be to save money, save time, or just to do it themselves, AI being used for legal advice continues gaining popularity.
Having a human attorney on your business team is essential, not only for their expertise, but also to assess the validity and accuracy of an AI's guidance. Further,
- An AI chatbot does not undergo the rigorous education, training, testing, and practical experience required of licensed lawyers.
- AI chatbots are not overseen by a regulatory body and certainly not a state's Supreme Court or Bar Association.
- AI is not subject to the high ethical and professional standards established by legal governing bodies.
- Under any other circumstances, legal advice provided by someone not licensed would be considered the unauthorized practice of law and be subject to stiff penalties.
On a day-to-day, practical basis, a human lawyer thinks critically and practically in ways that are yet to be programmed into AI. Lawyers have the ability to personalize the help they provide and know which online tools, including AI, is appropriate to use. A lawyer can personally evaluate your company’s specific goals and risks, ask the right questions, then cultivate a plan to avoid specific problems that a chatbot is not designed to accomplish.
Real lawyers use their experience to efficiently and adequately draft necessary documents, such as employment contracts, partnership agreements, and licenses. Attorneys analyze, outline, draft, review, edit and ensure the accuracy of all documents they create. They tailor corporate documents to the specific requirements of a company’s business model, which is often misunderstood by AI tools. Additionally, AI falls short of an actual attorney because:
- AI is beholden to prompts. Most founders do not know what legal issues need to be addressed, let alone the nuances of appropriately prompting the chatbot to provide the correct results.
- AI's ability to draft documents is only as good as the prompt and the data it was trained on.
- Chatbots hallucinate results, meaning they will make up information if they cannot find an answer to the prompted question.
- Publicly available AI tools are not trained on proprietary, private legal documents so their output will not necessarily have the nuanced legal language that is so important to a startup's protection and success.
A lawyer with experience in a particular industry will be far more valuable to a company’s success than an AI's attempt at legal help. AI may be able to answer basic questions (always fact-check AI responses), but it does not know how to tailor its responses to every aspect of a company’s needs like a lawyer can. As the old saying goes, "you get what you pay for." In the case of AI, founders are trying to save time and money by avoiding legal costs, but in the long run, they may be paying much more to fix a legal problem that could have been prevented.