The legal profession has no shortage of cautionary tales, and a shockingly topical one hit national headlines in June of 2023. In the wake of the generative artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT’s November 2022 public release, more and more individuals have been flocking to the platform’s intuitive, user-friendly layout and beginning to use the system to aid them in academic, personal, and professional endeavors. The platform’s release was groundbreaking due to its ability to use machine learning to craft intelligent, well-researched, and, above all, humanlike responses to inquiries. Users can further mold the platform’s responses by providing further guidance to hone the results until they are exactly what the user needs, all with significantly less time and effort expended than it would take to produce the answer by oneself.

     As law students around the country were being steadfastly warned about the extent to which they were allowed to use AI in an academic setting if at all, personal injury attorney Steven Schwartz was one step ahead of the game and relying heavily on ChatGPT to craft court filings on behalf of a new client suing an airline for negligence. The resulting legal research was pockmarked with legal citations that were not only incorrect but entirely made up, providing quotes from nonexistent judges in nonexistent opinions ruling on nonexistent controversies. Once discovered, Mr. Schwartz apologized profusely and received minor financial sanctions, which the judge noted he felt were particularly necessary due to Mr. Schwartz and his co-counsel’s failure to come “clean” of their own volition once concerns were raised about the legitimacy of the filing.

     Although Mr. Schwartz’s egregious abuse of AI for legal work can logically lead to the conclusion that the legal field’s tried-and-true traditional tactics are very much cemented in place and not going to be soon supplemented by AI, that may be the wrong conclusion to draw. As AI continues to grow and find a place for itself in various and numerous places in the world’s landscape, it becomes clearer by the day that AI is not going anywhere. To discuss AI’s precarious present location on the cusp of legal work, it is first necessary to raise the question of whether if AI and technology belong in our legal field in the first place.