Leveraging generaL ai ModeLs in your praCtiCe
Solo & Small Firm Section SectionCo-Chairs: DawnMyers – MyersLaw, P. A. & CortneyHarrington – JamesA. Schmidt, P. A.
by keeping your asks focused and easy to check, you will avoid ethical issues and gain time-saving assistance in managing your practice, freeing you up to do the legal work.
Artificial Intelligence( AI) is both the wave of the future and an ethical minefield. By now, you’ ve heard the stories of lawyers being sanctioned for including hallucinated cases in filings. But AI is useful for tasks other than drafting legal documents— particularly in assisting solo and small firms in all the other aspects of running a law firm, so long as ethical guidelines are followed. Here’ s some tips for using general AI models( such as Gemini, CoPilot, ChatGPT, or Grok) effectively. 1
Start with ethics
When using AI, be mindful of your ethical duties, including the duties of competence,
confidentiality, and candor. 2 To preserve confidentiality, the Florida Bar suggests that you get informed consent from your client if you are going to be submitting any client information to an AI tool. You should also favor tools that do not use your input for training its larger model( which often means a paid version). And don’ t fall into the trap of charging for more time than you actually spent— instead, consider valuebased billing. 3 Legal Fuel has significant AI resources for solos. 4 Most importantly, your duty to supervise those that work for you includes the duty to supervise AI, whether it is used by you directly, or by others in your firm. 5
Garbage In, Garbage Out
AI is only as good as the questions you ask and the data it trains on. You will get better results if you break tasks down into small, easily verifiable chunks, and give the questions lots of guardrails. You should tell it what its role is(“ You are a Microsoft Excel expert” or“ You are a seasoned marketing professional”), demand that it provide links to sources, and check sources at every step.
Think Low Risk, high Reward
Instead of asking AI to take in a large task like drafting a pleading, ask yourself how it can act as an
Continued on page 51
5 0 M A r- A p r 2 0 2 6 | H C B A L A W Y E r