For security of Client confidentiality, for the confidence that our work and our products are accurate, and legally sound as products of a depth of real-world legal experience and expertise, The Estate Planning Group is committed to using Zero AI in our practice.
“While everyone seems to be jumping on the band-wagon, I just can’t ignore the dangers and pitfalls of giving our work-product and our client data over to an unknown and unaccountable organization. People really don’t realize that that is exactly what they are doing when using AI to produce results” said Estate Planning Group founder attorney Kevin Davidson.
“Our work is unique, reflecting decades of experience and expertise, and our work involves extremely sensitive personal data for our clients and their families. First, we’re not giving that away for the larger market to exploit. The innovations and expertise that go into our planning is something no-one else can duplicate, and chances are high that any attempt to synthesize what we do to apply to someone else would result in failure of the critical legal framework. Second, we just won’t risk yet another convenient avenue for hackers and bad actors to access confidential information.” says Davidson.
We are bombarded daily with news touting all the advantages of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to take over all of our tasks and “make everything in life better!” While it is not even new or novel anymore, AI has hit the legal industry in a big way and all of the cool kids are doing it. In fact industry news is obsessed with how all of the providers and support services, from legal research to document assembly, to client case management, are leveraging AI to make the work easier. It’s an old story, but here we go again – lazy people want to find a way to get paid for doing work that they don’t actually do.
At The Estate Planning Group, we’ve always been a bit old-fashioned and more than a little skeptical of the trends that come and go in the legal industry. Hard work and diligence are the foundations to superior expertise and outcomes for our clients, so we’ve elected to ignore the trends that involve short-cuts. Over the years, most of these trends have been relatively innocuous – just quirks that we generally decline to inflict on our clients and staff – but this AI stuff is a lot more alarming.
First, AI is no more accurate or reliable than the input given by humans. Out of curiosity I recently conducted an experiment by asking Google AI the same question 5 time in a row. Not only did I receive 5 different answers, but All Five Answers Were Wrong! So next time you turn to Google to resolve an argument over some “fact”, be wary of who claims victory. Chances are pretty high that the AI summary is as stupid as the next guy’s half-baked theory. The reason for this is pretty simple, and actually self-evident if you take time to think it through – the AI summary Google provides is merely a survey of all of the unreliable and unverified crap that people have posted on websites and blogs. In short, relying on AI for accurate information is a bit like going to the cesspool for clean drinking water.
Next, at best, utilization of and reliance on AI reduces the actual competency of the attorneys utilizing it. In the same way we once knew by heart all of the phone numbers of people important to us, and now can’t even recite our own without looking at our “smart” phone, non-use of seemingly insignificant but critical legal language and reasoning will atrophy both the ability to detect inaccuracies and to creatively solve novel problems outside of the algorithm’s logic.
Finally, and this is the part that seems to go over the heads of most lawyers, even though it is their core ethical obligation to protect: there is no privilege or confidentiality protection at all! From a recent white paper article by software company The Form Tool, LLC: “Recent revelations by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and a federal court order requiring the indefinite retention of ChatGPT user logs have made one fact unavoidable: cloud-based AI tools do not offer legal privilege or confidentiality protection. This concern extends beyond general-purpose tools like ChatGPT. An increasing number of document automation vendors in the legal industry are integrating generative AI or cloud-based services into their offerings. While marketed as productivity boosters, these features often come at the cost of diminished confidentiality and uncertain privilege protections.”
In my experience, about 90% or more of attorneys who “do estate planning,” including those firms who purport to specialize in it, use these document automation vendors to produce their clients trusts, wills and estate plans – you can actually tell just by looking at the documents which vendor they used! And for those clients in the last 10 years or so since the industry started peddling cloud-based access and AI, their family’s most sensitive information is out there just waiting to become public. And here’s where the ethics failure comes in for lawyers – we have an obligation to our clients to maintain their confidential and privileged information fully under our direct control. The fact of the matter is, once it’s in the cloud and once it has been fed into any AI enhanced program, it is out of our control.
Got AI, or does AI got you? Not at The Estate Planning Group, LLC.