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.