Over the last year, we have been inundated with stories about the risks, benefits and effects of using artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace generally and as lawyers, specifically. We all read about the New York lawyers who were sanctioned for submitting a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by ChatGPT. We have been cautioned by courts and others about the dangers of relying on AI, some courts are even requiring disclosure of AI usage by attorneys when making a written submission. However, technology and AI have played active roles in legal research and writing for years. Research platforms, such as Westlaw, integrate AI technology in its searching capabilities, and both Westlaw and Lexis have invested substantially to further develop AI products such as Lexis+ AI which assists with legal drafting. In the discovery context, e-discovery platforms use, and have used for years, technology-assisted review (TAR) in the document review process, which uses techniques such as predictive coding (the ranking of documents based on how potentially relevant they are to the matter), filtering and email threading to automate and streamline parts of document review. Technology is here to stay and its role in how we lawyer will only grow. But it is important that we as lawyers learn how to use and embrace existing and future technology responsibly without shirking our professional and ethical responsibilities.

Recently, I was involved in a case with an extensive inadvertent privilege disclosure issue. While no lawyer is perfect and mistakes happen, our generation of lawyers has been given technological gifts that, when taken advantage of and used correctly and appropriately, can help prevent inadvertent disclosures and other such mistakes. In the case of this disclosure, most if not all vendors have tools you can use to identify and segregate privileged documents and double check to ensure no privileged documents have been inadvertently left within the production set. More generally, TAR can be used to predict and code countless documents at a time, greatly decreasing the length of time needed to review and code documents. As lawyers, we should embrace technological advances and use them responsibly and ethically to our advantage during e-discovery and elsewhere in our practice. Those that don't may be face an immense disadvantage in the future as technology advances further.