My firm had a thriving real estate practice in the 1980’s. When the real estate market tanked from 1989 until about 1996, they were not happy times. We did not hire any real estate lawyers in those days.
Tag: ai
Career Announcement – Chat GPT is pleased to announce that Murray Gottheil has finally achieved his life-long ambition to be a partner in Big Law!
I was bored this morning so I entered the following prompt into Chat GPT: “Create a biography for Murray Gottheil Canadian lawyer.”
This is what it told me:
My wife likes to tell the story of the first file that she worked on for me when she articled for my firm. (Those were in the days when she did what I told her to do, because I was the boss. Things have changed.)
I had her work on a financing file. Back in the day, financing statements under the Personal Property Security Act were typed on a government form, and submitted over the counter.
Martin is a lawyer who has closed many residential real estate transactions. Back when he was starting out, Martin read the relevant statutes and regulations and prepared all the documents himself. For each transaction, Martin drafted a Statement of Adjustments, adding numbers in his head. Eventually he used a calculator, and then a software program. Then, he hired a law clerk and taught her how to do it. Should the situation arise where Martin needs to prepare a Statement of Adjustments manually, he can easily do so, because he knows everything that there is to know about them. When a dispute arises as to the accuracy of a Statement of Adjustments, he can resolve it.
Categories
Death and Other Inconveniences
This article is about what I want to see from the Legal Tech industry. My basic message is: You technology folks are bringing our profession to its knees. Now we need you to sort out the mess and chart a way out for us. The clock is ticking. Get on with it!
The article resides on Appara’s website. You can access it here:
Categories
Abandoned Intelligence
There is no shortage of talk about the importance of lawyers delegating legal work to other lawyers and paralegals. Despite that, I have always believed that lawyers should not delegate work that they do not know how to do themselves. I questioned how anyone can check the quality of work done by their law clerks or associates if they do not know what a good job looks like.
So, so much chatter about Chat GPT. I believe some of it. I think that some of it is nonsense.
Here is the bottom line:
- Lawyers did not go out of business when computers were invented and we lost all of those hours reviewing draft after draft of retyped documents.
- We were still able to generate enough billable hours, even after we became able to produce documents faster with document automation software.
- Online legal databases did not replace articling students and junior associates.