With the emergence of ChatGBT and similar AI products and the panic it’s brought in the education sphere, I thought it would be a good exercise to take a look at what was happening in the 1990s when computer technology was being introduced into law schools and legal practice. Admittedly, I was in high school at this point and using a dial-up modem to write emails from my family’s shared Compuserve account, so I saw no reason to be afraid of this technology. But what was happening in legal scholarship and bar journals? Was there panic like there is with ChatGBT? Let’s take a look.
There were concerns about legal scholarship, copyright, and making those articles available online. Questions arose about federal government record-keeping laws and whether they were sufficient to ensure government entities preserved email messages. Another article (Oops – Can I Take It Back) cautioned practitioners about pitfalls around