Lawyers attend years of school and must pass the state bar exam to practice law. Attorneys must adhere to strict professional standards when providing clients with legal advice, representing them in court or assisting them with negotiations.
Most attorneys are diligent when representing their clients, but some professionals fail to meet the standards established for the profession. As technology changes, legal professionals often modify their practices to make use of labor-saving technology.
In some cases, the inappropriate use of artificial intelligence (AI) generative software could lead to claims of legal malpractice.
AI can fabricate information
Generative AI produces written text based on prompts and other information from users. Unfortunately, AI may access inaccurate information in some cases. Other times, it may hallucinate or fabricate information that doesn’t exist on the internet.
There has been an increase in malpractice claims and disciplinary issues with lawyers related to the use of AI for case briefs and other legal writing. There have been substantiated cases of AI hallucinating judicial precedents that do not exist, leading to lawyers submitting inaccurate paperwork to the courts on behalf of their clients.
Using AI to streamline the writing process is likely not an act of malpractice. However, the failure to vet the information generated by AI software and the submission of inaccurate paperwork could constitute legal malpractice. Clients negatively impacted by a lawyer’s reliance on software could potentially have grounds for a malpractice lawsuit.
Exploring how an attorney’s performance deviated from best practices can help disappointed clients determine if they experienced legal malpractice. If lawyers do not meet or exceed current professional standards, they may need to answer for the damage their negligence causes their clients.