Clients have begun to ask, quite properly, whether their documents are being drafted by a machine. The answer at this firm is set out here so that no one has to ask.
We use these tools where they are a better version of something a law office has always done: assembling a chronology from a document production, comparing successive drafts of an agreement, searching a transcript, checking a citation against the reporter. In that register the technology is unambiguously good. It reads faster than any of us and does not tire on the two thousandth page.
We do not use them to decide anything, to generate advice, or to produce authority. Every proposition of law in every paper that leaves this office has been read in the original by a lawyer. Every instrument has been read line by line by the attorney whose signature appears on it. That is the standing rule and there is no category of document exempt from it.
Client material is not submitted to any tool that trains on it or retains it, and where a matter is sensitive enough that the question would trouble the client, the tools are not used at all. If you would like to know precisely which technology touched your file, ask, and you will be told.
