There was a time when many turned to the use of artificial intelligence as a way to shortcut workflows and decrease the need for study or investigation. While it can help draft items such as a federal ADA complaint in just minutes, it also reduces labor time and thus billable hours. And then there’s the possibility of inaccuracies — true with any procedure, either human or tech.
This means that litigation is no longer limited to cases where attorneys see a clear profit. AI is expanding access in ways that create many more potential plaintiffs — and each new filing adds incremental discovery, response and defense costs for defendants.
From the law practice perspective, that may mean more money. Each time a complaint is written using AI, defendants have to respond and do their homework, perhaps at higher rates.
“AI can reduce drafting time, but the total time we litigate — discovery, finding export witnesses and actual court time — rises because we get more cases and more volume,” said attorney Matt Fibroski, who now works in private practice in Utah. “With AI, there’s always a risk and more regulations to work through, so attorney fees can be higher, sometimes significantly higher.”
That’s because AI-generated filings can be inaccurate or sanctionable. A study by Stanford University’s HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence) program revealed that 1 in 6 AI-generated cases have been
sanctioned.
“Large language models have a documented tendency to ‘hallucinate,’ or make up false information,” the Stanford program reported. “In one highly-publicized case, a New York lawyer faced sanctions for citing ChatGPT-invented fictional cases in a legal brief; many similar cases have since been reported. And our previous study of general-purpose chatbots found that they hallucinated between 55 and 82 percent of the time on legal queries, highlighting the risks of incorporating AI into legal practice.”
So law firms are spending more on AI integration for training and oversight. Those costs can be passed on to clients. AI usage reduces some costs but can increase others, so contemplating budgets can become tricky.
The Stanford study pointed out how the usage of AI technology has changed strategies and operational procedures in many industries. Insurance companies are adjusting to AI-related risks that can challenge underwriting models and cause potential losses. Corporate legal departments are adding in-house litigation expenditures for personnel while moving away from simple cost-based decisions involving risks to their reputations. And there are industry reports that private rights of action in new AI laws could create repeat litigation with limited actual harm. That means burdening courts and budgets in ways similar to past patterns under consumer-protection statues.
Something more for law firms to be aware of in this day of AI.