The Oklahoma Bar Journal August 2023

O NE OF THE LOWLIGHTS OF A LAWYER’S LEGAL CAREER IS WHAT ONE CAN CALL, for ease of reference, an “online research fail.” While attorneys have come to trust the robust and accurate flagging system of online research tools to warn us if a case has been overturned or even called into question by another authority, online databases occasionally miss one, and we offer the case to the court as “good law,” only to discover the case has been overturned. It happens even to the most careful lawyers.

or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.” 1 Generative artificial intelligence “learns how to take actions from past data” and “creates brand new content – a text, an image, even computer code – based on that training, instead of simply categorizing or identifying data like other AI.” 2 AI is not yet sentient, but you can imagine the uses in law, many of which have been around for years (like online natural-language/ Boolean searches and predictive coding in electronic discovery) and many of which are winging their way into our legal lives now , like AI-generated legal briefing.

Clearly, traditional databases are not infallible, just as humans are not infallible. And yet, members of the bar association have come to rely on Westlaw, LexisNexis, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network (OSCN) and other data bases to streamline the time com mitment it takes to find law. There are only so many hours in a day, many of which we need to save for drafting briefs that cite those cases. Briefs won’t write themselves. Or will they? WHAT IS GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Enter generative artificial intel ligence. “The term ‘artificial intel ligence’ means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations

GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN LEGAL BRIEF WRITING Many lawyers are not great writers, so it is not surprising that some practitioners have resorted to generative AI to write legal briefs. While AI cannot write like, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps one day it will. It is already argu ably better than what we see turned out of some law firms on a regular basis. Consider this excerpt by Mr. Fitzgerald: This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea – if you gazed intently

Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.

AUGUST 2023 | 17

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL