Articles
Should legal professionals get therapy or advice from an AI Chatbot? Probably not.
An Intelligent Response: AI Counseling vs. Human Counseling - OAAP InSights
Seeking out professional help
A Lawyers Guide to Choosing a Mental Health Therapist by Michelle Fontenot, Director of the Texas Lawyers' Assistance Program.
Staying competent in the age of new technology:
Responsible AI Use: Practical Knowledge and Tips is your entry point into the world of Artificial Intelligence. Learn what it is, how it works, what it can do and what to watch out for. This presentation begins with some AI related terminology, followed by an explanation of how AI models are trained, some of our ethical duties with respect to AI use and specific use case examples that will help you dip your toe into the AI arena.
Part I: The Good (Efficiency & The Practice of Law)
The "Second Chair" Associate: Using AI for first-drafting of routine documents (demand letters, discovery requests, nondisclosure agreements).
- eDiscovery & Predictive Coding: How Technology Assisted Review (TAR) has moved from "novel" to "standard" for sorting massive document dumps.
- Practice Management Automation: AI tools that handle intake, scheduling, and client communication
- Transactional Speed: Using AI to quickly analyze contracts for "market" terms vs. "outlier" clauses (e.g., flagging an indemnity clause that deviates from the standard).
Part II: The Bad (Ethical Gray Areas & Professional Responsibilities)
- The "Black Box" Problem (Duty of Competence):
- Confidentiality Breaches (The "Public" Input Error): What happens when a lawyer pastes sensitive client data into a public version of ChatGPT?
- The Death of the Billable Hour? If AI writes a brief in 30 minutes that used to take 10 hours, can you ethically bill for 10 hours? (The answer is generally no). But alternative fee structures (flat fees, value billing) may be beneficial or necessitated by AI efficiency.
Part III: The Ugly (Sanctions, Deepfakes, & Malpractice)
- Hallucinations & Fake Citations: Mata v. Avianca: the Marbury v. Madison of non-existent cases invented by ChatGPT.
- Copyright & Data Theft: The massive lawsuits against AI companies (e.g., New York Times v. OpenAI) regarding the theft of intellectual property to train models.
- Prompt Injection Attacks: Security vulnerabilities where bad actors "trick" a law firm's AI bot into revealing confidential internal instructions or client data.
- Deepfakes in Evidence: “Cheapfake” vs. “deepfake” and the new frontier of evidentiary challenges that go with AI.
PLUS: A BRIEF UPDATE ON ARCP AMENDMENTS EFFECTIVE JANUARY 1, 2026