The Oklahoma Bar Journal April 2023

practice. Ms. Lee is a bankruptcy attorney (or, as she likes to call it, a debt and credit strategy attorney) and is licensed in California and North Dakota. But do not think that you can stop answering your phone and have good results. Both of these lawyers have sophisticated auto mation systems and virtual recep tionists in place who have been well-trained to triage incoming calls, e.g. , “Your honor, when is a good time for her to call you back today?” Existing clients may be asked if they have posted their questions to the client portal. Potential new client inquiries are prioritized appropriately. Onboarding new clients involves detailed explanations of the pro cess and obtaining the new client’s agreement with this communica tion system. But clients generally seem accepting. Isn’t a scheduled call better than waiting for a phone call to be returned whenever? The lawyers then have their days arranged with blocks of time

well, you need to carefully proof the ChatGPT output since it has been known to “hallucinate” non existent legal citations. We agree with the prevailing TECHSHOW wisdom that these large language model 3 AI tools, like ChatGPT, will be a significant disruptor for many soon. One thought repeated so many times at TECHSHOW it seemed like a cliché was, “AI won’t replace lawyers, but lawyers using AI may replace lawyers who don’t.” In fact, there was an interesting preconference event: Casetext 4 announced what it describes as “the first AI legal assistant,” CoCounsel, 5 on a national network morning show. The company rep resentatives noted it differed from the commercially available version of ChatGPT because it was trained on Casetext’s legal information database. The service was dis cussed in a TECHSHOW session the ABA Journal covered in “How Can Lawyers Use AI to Improve Their Practice?” 6

Premier legal technology jour nalist Bob Ambrogi has posted his review of ABA TECHSHOW. 7 Mr. Ambrogi was surprised with an unexpected lifetime achieve ment award that made him speechless. 8 His blog, Law Sites at www.lawnext.com, is an important source of legal technol ogy news. As the acquisitions and mergers of legal technology com panies heated up greatly, it was one place we could go to remem ber which company now owned what tool. Some presenters talked about how they were running their operations in a way most would believe to be impossible – a family law or consumer bankruptcy prac tice where they do not answer the phone. Regina Edwards and Jen Lee gave a compelling presenta tion titled “Early and Often: Better Client Communication through Automation.” Ms. Edwards has been practicing family law in Georgia since 2001 and just added an estate planning division to her

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THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL