AI Defeats Three Lawyers? Is This the End of Lawyers?
A victim of a car accident successfully defeated the defendant, who hired three prominent lawyers, in a lawsuit that was originally expected to be an easy win, by operating generative AI on his own.
Most lawyers who read about this will think it is merely sensationalism. After all, the facts of this criminal case involve a car accident followed by an assault, which is a virtually guaranteed win. Coupled with the prosecutor’s indictment, the chances of winning were already high; it seemed as though one could win just by writing a complaint with their eyes closed.
However, if we only see this, we underestimate the significant implications revealed behind this event.
The Core Value Shift of Lawyers
Upon closely examining the news, you will find that this party did not use AI haphazardly; he was a “correct” user. I believe this points precisely to the true value of legal practitioners in the age of AI.
First, the end of free consultations? High-quality prompts are incredibly valuable.
Firstly, we see that the prompt inputted by this party to the AI was not a random description; rather, it was a conclusion and advice he organized from many lawyers’ “free consultations.”
This point is crucial. Fellow lawyers, please think carefully: free consultations may be inadvertently providing others with an advantage.
In the past, we believed that the most disruptive advancement of generative AI lay in its ability to deeply interpret and integrate “unstructured data.” Meeting minutes, several lawyers’ strategy notes, and the party’s oral accounts—AI can organize these seemingly chaotic pieces of information into a logical document.
However, garbage in, garbage out. The quality of the input directly determines the success of the output. A party who only vaguely states, “I was assaulted, how should I sue him?” will receive vastly different results from one who can provide “integrated opinions from multiple lawyers.” Your free consultations, your professional judgments, and litigation strategies have, unknowingly, become the fertilizer for training the opposing party’s AI and optimizing its prompts. The party is effectively using your intellectual output to guide a digital assistant that does not tire and works tirelessly. Therefore, I must say, lawyers, stop providing free consultations. In the age of AI, every time you provide professional output, it could become an extremely valuable prompt.
Lawyers as “Orchestrators”
This party understood “layered processing.” In his complaint, he separated “statement of facts” from “basis of claims” and even personally checked the legal provisions to ensure that the AI did not generate any “hallucinations.”
What does this illustrate?
He understands the “structure” of a legal case. He knows that facts and legal applications are two distinct matters that need to be handled separately to avoid confusion, and he also recognizes that AI outputs must be manually verified.
This is what I believe to be the most important value of future legal practitioners—becoming an “orchestrator.”
Where Do We Lawyers’ Expertise Manifest?
When a party brings a personal injury case to us, we know to categorize it under criminal injury offenses and remind them of the possibility of ancillary civil litigation. We clearly understand the elements of criminal offenses and the basis of civil tort claims, as well as the subtle differences between the two.
This knowledge serves as the blueprint we use to “design the structure.”
With the assistance of AI, a lawyer’s role is no longer to labor over every word but to become the conductor of a project, an architect of a system. We are responsible for:
- Defining the problem: transforming the client’s chaotic needs into clear legal issues.
- Designing the process: planning the steps to handle the case, such as what evidence to collect first, whether to focus on criminal or civil matters first, and what sections the complaint should include.
- Assigning tasks: issuing precise prompts for AI to execute for each designed phase.
- Quality control: reviewing the content produced by AI, verifying the correctness of legal provisions, and injecting human care and strategic adjustments.
Conclusion: How to Make “Orchestration” Smoother?
From this seemingly simple case, we glimpse the next step in the evolution of AI and the inevitability of lawyers’ transformation. We are no longer merely legal wordsmiths but “orchestrators” wielding powerful tools.
In the future, those legal professionals who can master this “orchestration” ability and understand how to collaborate with AI will be the ones to thrive.