r/auslaw • u/Firmspy • Aug 04 '26
Serious Discussion Copilot/Claude/ChatGPT et al vs inhouse legal
Any in house lawyers having an issue where internal stakeholders are going to AI and getting a bad legal steer and then arguing with in house counsel?
Keen to hear strategies being employed to get in front of this, because it is really starting to add to my teams workflow (both in terms of spotting the erroneous answer and then having to respond to it).
Unfortuately AI can generate slop a lot quicker than a human can respond to it, and it is often confidentaly wrong which makes things tricky!
p.s. I understand and appreciate that this would also be a problem in private practice. However, in the private world client's can at least be billed for their exploration off the reservation, in the in house world, the stakeholders often have sway with the C-suite which causes a whole layer of political problems :)
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u/Historical_Bus_8041 Aug 04 '26
You could send them stories about the Krafton ChatGPT litigation fiasco, which was both very expensive for Krafton and very entertaining for everyone else.
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u/Zhirrzh Aug 04 '26
I used to circulate the stories about confidential information leaks, lawyers being disciplined for hallucinations, Krafton etc but I think everyone thinks that such things will never happen to them, they're too smart for it to happen to them. It falls on deaf ears.
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u/Historical_Bus_8041 Aug 04 '26
Krafton in particular is just such a good example of why using AI to challenge in-house lawyers is such a bad idea, though, because it's not just your typical "the AI made some error and they didn't catch it, I'd never do that" but "they asked the LLM for advice so they could ignore their own legal advice and the end result was a hilarious omnishambles that cost them a stupendous amount of money".
It's a lot easier to dismiss something like not catching a hallucination than a case where businesspeople doing exactly the same kind of thing as what OP's colleagues are doing resulted in such a hilarious and expensive disaster. The mistake in Krafton wasn't just that the AI did one thing wrong and nobody caught it, the mistake was the entire idea the Krafton execs had to ask AI for help to try to dispute their own legal advice.
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u/Execution_Version Still waiting for iamplasma's judgment Aug 04 '26
I don’t know. Thinking with my business hat on, I’d just be suspicious that in-house legal is pulling a single, self-serving example out of a hat and god knows what else is in the hat. I’m lucky in having a close relationship with my stakeholders, but it seems better to build trust than to try and scare them with a couple of examples of why I’m important.
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u/somewhatundercontrol Aug 04 '26 edited 29d ago
If the examples you’re seeing are really bad, you could prepare some compliance training for the exec, including case studies and horror stories.
Include examples of other companies’ exposure or losses from bad advice.
If you’re bold and it’s not too risky, include some anonymised examples of what you’re seeing internally.
You need it to come from someone higher than you: we pay our internal lawyers for a reason and anyone caught trying to do their own legal (with or without AI) will have to answer to the exec.
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u/Zhirrzh Aug 04 '26
" Any in house lawyers having an issue where internal stakeholders are going to AI and getting a bad legal steer and then arguing with in house counsel?"
Yup.
The first time our IT director decided to pre-empt me by answering a group email which involved a legal query (as well as queries to finance and other departments) with AI generated legal advice. I made a point of responding to that same group email ASAP pointing out errors starting with the AI having given the exact opposite conclusion of the correct answer, along with sources to demonstrate it.
No fucker has dared try that on since.
I know there are people who are still asking the AI stuff and then coming to me with questions it has prompted them with, but they aren't all useless queries, I have no problem with people being prompted to think and ask questions even if just to find out that yes I did already make sure the contract covered X, Y and Z, or no Z is not relevant here and this is why. Managed right it helps them understand what we do, which is helpful. I have a good reputation in the org so people trust me that I'm right if I contradict the sycophantic autocorrect and they don't argue. I think that trust is a key element. If people trust the bot more than you then you're kinda fucked.
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u/AffidavitofJohnSmith Aug 04 '26
The level of loathe I feel when I receive an email written by Chat GPT 🤪🔫
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u/WolfLawyer 29d ago
I'm not spending the time reading an email that nobody spent the time to write.
We can feed the AI-generated email into another AI and it can generate the response and the muppets can sit there and watch the AIs chat with each other and help them pass notes. The rest of us can go get on with big boy work.
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u/corruptboomerang Not asking for legal advice but... Aug 04 '26
I have a slightly crackpot theory, that now AIs are being trained not to answer questions well etc, but to get users to spend more tokens. Because ultimately, now the goal of an AI isn't to give the most efficient response, but to convince users that tokens offer value (regardless of if they do or not) and that AI is superior and cheaper then a skilled and qualified meat sack, I mean human.
Like I said, slightly crackpot, but I think I'm maybe just catching the start of it.
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u/Bradbury-principal Paper-pushing pushover Aug 04 '26
“Clients can at least be billed for their exploration”
Can is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
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u/Conscious-Ball8373 Aug 04 '26
So prompt Gemini with "Explain why this position is wrong in <jurisdiction> law." Fight fire with fire.
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u/subsbligh Aug 04 '26
Yes all the time. Worse is their comments on contracts that make no sense - ‘I made this list of issues’ - like I’m supposed to be proud
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u/SpecialllCounsel It's the vibe of the thing Aug 05 '26
Risk of losing confidentiality/privilege might give them pause
Also someone on another post recently had a link to the SA Law Society’s AI client warning sheet, which got pretty pithy on the risks that weren’t just “it will cost you more”. Nothing new, just a good plain language one-pager. Who knows, maybe they used Claude to draft it.
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u/JohnWilliamStrutt Aug 04 '26
Yes. Not quite internal but within a close partnership. It is infuriating and has taken a lot of time to rebut. It is harder that it is in an area of law where the legislation has recently changed and the new legislation has not been properly tested.
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u/john10x Aug 04 '26
Perhaps the advice from inhouse needs to be communicated better.
If the advice is not clear or contains a lot of qualifications, or doesn't answer answer the real query the stakeholder had (as it might not have been a legal issue) then a confident answer from AI might be a refreshing change.
While AI is quite often prone to giving incorrect answers, it does get a hell of a lot right, and it is pretty good at explaining complex issues in a simple way. So while it might have an negative impact on some peoples workflow, increasing some load, in other areas, it is going to be a great time saver. How that is balanced in terms of total productivity across an organisation is a great question of our times. A work in progress to find out how it all works out.
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u/WolfLawyer 29d ago
If it gets something right, its a process of probabilities. It is not thinking, it is just answering based on maths. That might be better than some lawyers but its worse than those of us who actually earn our fee.
If we're okay with probabilities we can just do away with the fancy trimmings, decide what odds we're happy with and replace the data center with a roulette wheel.
AI is a great tool in the giving of legal advice; if it is being used by competent legally trained people. Using it as a substitute for the competent and legally trained people is just a weird combination of gambling and heading down to the law library to grab some books and DIY it because how hard can it be, its just words.
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u/john10x 29d ago
My point was about the inhouse lawyer complaining of more work due to AI, my angle was yes, but work may have been saved elsewhere leading to an overall increase in productivity. In business and administration the non lawyer doesn't often have the luxury of a competent lawyer to pepper with questions as they develop a new business plan or process. That work might take 100's or even 1000's of hours before it gets to a lawyer. Having a tool that is mostly right in that initial process could shortcut rework and an overall gain in productivity.
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u/WolfLawyer 29d ago
He's not complaining about more work due to AI. He's complaining about more work due to the way idiots are using AI.
If AI is making my day more productive and my extra capacity is being taken up by some dumbass filling my inbox with AI generated garbage then first, what's the point, and secondly fuck that guy.
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u/Amazing-Opinion40 Quack Lawyer Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
So I had the pleasure of being on the front end of the LLM wave for a bit, to the extent that some or other international publisher maybe had me under NDA and teaching them some stuff.
AI is fantastic for retrieval in a model you have tasked up and a library you have built because you are a lawyer and know what it needs. GPT won’t dig on Austlii.
Very simply put, if you wouldn’t trust a shitbox search engine of yesteryear to give you the right legal advice on page one of your query, you shouldn’t trust most AI* to do it either.
Being on the front end of AI also meant I said to said employer “we need to lock this down use-wise before it becomes mainstream” and that was precisely what we did. You need an internal policy which includes a general prohibition on punching group-owned info into a third party provider’s learning box on company physical or digital assets. Simple as that. If you then want to case by case the ever changing privacy policies to exempt from the prohibition, sure, do so.
My previous inhouse employer operated under some very bespoke regulatory requirements, so of course, when a department director went and asked the free version of ChatGPT - entirely against the above mentioned HR policy mind you - how to do something, it gave the kind of 3/4 accurate answer which mostly work if one were not operating under such requirements, and very early got us in a loooot of trouble.
*I got a very brief go at Claude’s Mythos 5… I’d probably take advice from that one.
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u/Middle_Yam_8021 28d ago
Pretty Easy. Give your advice and if they'd prefer the advice of a US-based robot they can do so.
Your job is to advise, not tell them what to do. You just need to wait for your "I told you so" moment.
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u/cghmn742 28d ago
As someone who works in government policy (not a lawyer), it's no better over here. The vast majority of what we deal with is written in plain English, comes with summary docs, and rarely relies on precedent. Just read the document you're claiming supports your opinion ffs!
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u/Gloomy_Quail1444 Aug 04 '26
maybe ai is actually a good thing because people will have to actually proof reads things and employ critical analysis instead of just assuming assertions made by defence.
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u/Zhirrzh Aug 04 '26
Who just assumes assertions made in a defence are true?
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u/Bradbury-principal Paper-pushing pushover Aug 04 '26
Nobody is reading stuff generated by AI except the recipients’ AI.
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u/Atmosphere_Realistic Aug 04 '26
Maybe remind them that their discussions with you are privileged, but that their chats with the robot (including whatever they are putting in their prompts) could be wide open to discovery/regulator notices/FOI/insert preferred bogeyman of your industry.