Guest post by Justin Tung, Reference Librarian at Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas School of Law
Recently, Adam Bent, a fellow Law Librarian and former classmate of mine, published an article in Pace Law Review entitled “Large Language Models: AI’s Legal Revolution.”[1] In it, he lays out a well-researched history of Chatbots and Large Language Models (LLM’s), giving historical perspective to the situation the legal industry is currently facing in terms of the “AI Legal Revolution.” The overarching conclusion is that treating all LLMs as suffering from the same undesirable characteristics, namely issues of confidentiality and hallucinations, is inaccurate, and that legal-oriented LLM such as CoCounsel or Lexis+ AI are designed specifically to not suffer from those issues. The argument is that since such priorities are integral to the design of these models, their use by legal academics, practitioners, and judiciaries can and should use them ethically.
Although I agree with