Judge Schlegel said Friday that he has had debates with people all around the world over when attorneys should and shouldn't use generative AI.
He added that he is concerned about young attorneys becoming too reliant on generative AI or large language models and not knowing how to be lawyers.
"Do the hard work and then feed it into the LLM if you want to. Then, you can go and say, 'Hey, I don't like this paragraph. Rework it for me. Hey, what do you think about my first draft in comparison to this?' And have a back-and-forth with it," Judge Schlegel said.
Judge Schlegel encouraged older attorneys to mentor the next generation of lawyers, even if they can get their work done without the help of associates.
Supreme Court of the State of New York Justice Timothy S. Driscoll added that if older attorneys at small law firms don't mentor younger lawyers, they will not have anyone to take over their firms.
"God help us if AI takes that away. Then, what are we doing?" he said about older attorneys mentoring younger ones.
Judge Schlegel and Justice Driscoll spoke on a panel with Wake County District Court Judge Ashleigh Parker of North Carolina about ethical use of generative AI and judges' expectations in the courtroom.
During the panel, the judges discussed the New York personal injury case where attorneys submitted fake case citations to a federal court and how generative AI can hallucinate or generate false information.
Judge Schlegel said that retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, a process where a LLM retrieves information from internal datasets, doesn't solve hallucinations, citing a Stanford University study on top AI legal research tools.
"There's nothing that can properly RAG and get rid of all hallucinations," he said. "Do your jobs, and you'll be fine."
Judge Parker added that as long as attorneys keep misusing generative AI and submitting fake case citations, older judges are going to have a challenging time accepting the technology.
Several judges issued standing orders blocking or putting guidelines on the use of generative AI in their courtrooms following the New York personal injury case.
"It's those folks that we know that were in law school that were cutting corners that are continuing to cut corners with generative AI, and it's really hurting the rest of us," Judge Parker said.
--Editing by Daniel King.
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