In late 2022, ChatGPT made its appearance. The arrival of the artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot came like a storm for people worldwide, which has not subsided to this day. On the contrary, ChatGPT promises to continue to evolve and thereby be able to support us in everyday life in more and more ways. Having witnessed the rise of the smart chatbot for several months, legal platform Mr. did a survey of lawyers and experts in legal practice. How should lawyers relate to ChatGPT? Evert Stamhuis, professor of Law and Innovation at Erasmus School of Law, was also questioned in the June issue of Mr. Mr. According to Stamhuis, the question is not whether the legal sector should embrace ChatGPT, but how.
Generative AI based on large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, offers great potential and can facilitate legal work, the roundtable found. Especially in fact-finding and translation of texts, ChatGPT can give lawyers a helping hand. Yet caution is also needed when using the tool. For example, ChatGPT does not understand context and the source citation is brief and sometimes irrelevant. Rather than replacing it, therefore, the tool is better viewed as a complementary tool: a way to offer lawyers' services more efficiently and cheaply.
Stamhuis also sees benefit in using ChatGPT in the legal and academic worlds. Especially when the tool is used as a "writing aid" - the technology can write a first draft about legal situations that have occurred many times in the past. Stamhuis puts the advance of and concerns about technology into perspective through the changing zeitgeist. "A legal library was óready a tool to support one's own study of primary sources of law, with a key role for the expert librarian," he tells Mr. Stamhuis. Library skills have now evolved to database skills. A new era brings new tools, according to Stamhuis.
Therefore, according to the professor of Law and Innovation, ignoring or banning it makes no sense. Rather, Stamhuis adopts an open, yet careful attitude: "Legal tech offers us as educators the wonderful challenge of arriving at a critically constructive attitude with students." In doing so, by the way, he considers it very important that students get a look "under the hood" of the chatbot. To date, this has not been forthcoming because ChatGPT is owned by tech giant OpenAI. Therefore, Stamhuis is currently involved in developing his own LLM - the Erasmian Language Model - which will play a role in the Law & Technology master's and the AI & Societal impact minor.
ChatGPT can thus be of value within the legal (academic) sector, as long as one remains critical and transparent, thus protecting originality and uniqueness in works. When writing scholarly articles, for Stamhuis, for example, this means that journal editors, peer reviewers, publishers, authors and knowledge institutions should carefully discuss the use of technology. There must also be room in the methodological section of publications for openness about use of ChatGPT, just as publicists currently already must be transparent about the use of databases and search terms.
Although Stamhuis considers continued public debate about GPT technology necessary, he considers it his "wonderful mission" to train today's students to become the tech savvy lawyers of the future. These lawyers are tech savvy and know the value of fundamental rights and the rule of law in changing times. Above all, according to Stamhuis, we should not let worries paralyze us. Lawyers may no longer be able to avoid the advent of AI, but digitization equally shows how indispensable knowledgeable, human lawyers are.
