By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, early, and I have the George Washington Law School Alumni Magazine.
It’s crammed with photos of young, attractive professors and coat-and-tie-wearing students; but this particular issue is dedicated to Artificial Intelligence.
I rarely read this magazine, thinking its a slick, self-congratulatory, thinly disguised plea for money. But for several years I have wondered how AI is going to change my often misunderstood profession.
When I was at GW, most of its graduates went into a nearby agency like Justice, the FTC, the IRS — some federal bureaucracy that was just across the street from Stockton Hall.
I knew that the FTC, FDA and the other federal regulating organizations were built on mountains of paper. Actually a mountain of enabling legislation that has been amended by Congress or “interpreted” by courts — all of which was crammed into huge, expandable, loose-leaf binders that detail everything from pharmaceutical approval to consumer finance.
But I, myself, spurned these faceless federal bureaucracies; and went home to South Carolina eventually starting a small-town practice on Carteret Street.
When I returned, I learned that the really smart graduates — the lawyers who wanted to get into court quickly — had memorized the rules that dealt with “procedure” rather than substance. If one was going to practice in South Carolina one had to know about filings, what actually went into a Summons or a Motion for Summary Judgment.
I still think one must (almost) memorize the rules of procedure if one wants to practice in Court.
“Procedure” is the gateway to substance — substance being the actual statutory law that legislatures make. Substance is also the law the appeals courts make when they file their opinions across the United States. And its here, with AI, where substance can be married to the “facts” facing the sole-practitioner who opens shop adjacent the courthouse in, say, Ridgeland.
AI provides an instantaneous search through mountains of rules, regulations, case decisions, law review articles and then laminates that “legal wisdom” atop the facts that walked in the door earlier that morning.
All of which can be bundled into a brief that one might use when making his or her argument against the Defendant’s motion a for summary judgment.
It is this desktop portal that puts the small-town lawyer on the same playing field as the big boys and girls who inhabit the huge, multi-state law firms that represent big business and big government.
As I sit here this morning I understand how Chat GPT might also take a 10,000 word-long municipal code section detailing zoning in Charleston; or a water-sharing agreement between Georgia and South Carolina; or some otherwise indecipherable regulation on nuclear waste disposal and reduce it to 10 readable bullets.
Having this relatively cheap desktop tool almost levels the field when an injured buyer seeks compensation from a large maker of, say, microwave ovens.
But that, of course, ignores the fact that months of “discovery” make this playing field entirely un-level. Months of costly depositions, production of correspondence, e-mails, tax returns give the big firms — firms representing the negligent manufacturing corporation — a definite advantage.
All of which would make seating the jury the last advantageous card to be played by the young, Ridgeland-based lawyer going up against the big boys who practice in the huge firms housed in the sleek, tinted-glass buildings that shadow our state Capitol Building.
But wait!
We read that lawyers are now using AI to evaluate jurors notwithstanding the widespread belief that jurors come to the jury box tethered to difficult-to-determine bias and hidden prejudice.
And we also read that at UNC Law School students have actually re-tried a previously decided case using Chat, Grok and Claude as the jury. Now, make no mistake this was a mock law school experiment to see if AI’s verdict matched-up with a previously rendered human-made verdict.
Transcripts and other evidence were submitted to these AI entities and they came back with an acquittal notwithstanding the fact that a real, living judge found the young defendant guilty.
One might ask, “What’s the point?”
Perhaps these young students anticipate a legal landscape where the facts and the law are turned over to AI.
“Why would we do that?”
Perhaps these students want to cleanse the “jury” of its bias, anger and the fact some may find the Plaintiff’s lawyer sexy?
As George Washington University turns out graduates who are fluent in the application of Artificial Intelligence, GW should be cautious when considering whether AI should enter into the actual judging part of this ancient, Magna Carta-inspired process.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.