I fear how AI will affect education, art, and culture. Those reservations, however, do not stop me from using frontier AI models every day, usually in ways that don’t occur to other attorneys. AI can enhance productivity if you use it safely and effectively. That begins with staying committed to the everyday thinking and learning, reading and writing, and professional at-bats (depositions, mediations, oral arguments, trials, and the like) that slowly build deep expertise while giving clients the benefit of our best human thinking and professional judgment.
Earlier this year, I gave a talk at the University of Oklahoma College of Law about AI and legal writing, where I shared three ground rules for using AI in legal practice. I discuss these below. First, however, as part of my new series of online workshops and presentations, I have an event to announce that will be eye-opening for those who attend.
AI Workflows for Lawyers (Presentation)
Date: Thursday, September 17, 2026
Time: Noon–1 p.m. Pacific (3:00–4:00 p.m. Eastern)
Format and duration: 60-minute presentation and Q&A, live on Zoom; not recorded
Rate: $199
I can show you legal-AI workflows you haven’t seen before, ones that require no software beyond a subscription to Claude or ChatGPT. I’ll show you how I use AI as an assistant to revise documents using dictation; canvas evidence databases to help with discovery and trial-preparation; map evidence to testimony and discovery responses, checking for inconsistencies and gaps; and run detailed cite-checks against authoritative sources, including by ensuring that each cited source supports the precise proposition advanced and exploring whether other citations would strengthen the brief.
Why this won’t be like other legal-AI presentations: I’m a practicing litigator who knows how to code, spent two years researching AI on the UCLA Law faculty, and tracks AI developments by following the discourse of software engineers and industry insiders.
Prerequisites and caveats: The presentation will assume above-average general computing skills and basic familiarity with generative-AI software like Claude and ChatGPT. How-to guidance for implementing the workflows will be supplied through a handout or screencasts, not during the presentation itself. As I put it in Chapter 11 of Elegant Legal Writing (Writing with Technology), this “is intended not to serve as a how-to manual but to give you a sense of what is possible.”
Now, the three ground rules. AI can make you a better attorney if and only if you honor these:
You are responsible for ensuring that your work is accurate. This has always been true, including in non-AI contexts. For example, attorneys cannot rubber-stamp filings prepared by inexperienced assistants, rely on a summer associate’s research memo without checking its reasoning and conclusions, quote something secondhand without checking and citing the original source, assume that cited cases remain good law, and so on. In short, attorneys cannot delegate their ethical duties of competence and candor to an AI service any more than they could delegate them to a human assistant. Every significant legal and factual representation in a court filing must be checked, and the attorneys who sign legal briefs are always accountable for what they contain no matter how it got there.
Do your own thinking and writing. Use AI as an editor and writing assistant, not as a substitute for your own thinking and writing. Most legal analysis is performed through the writing process. We learn and problem-solve by and through the act of writing. Sitting still with a blank page, and working to corral and organize one’s thoughts so they can be communicated effectively, is central to what great writers do, and the same is true for litigation attorneys. Using AI as a shortcut to do core reading and writing tasks can spare you labor, but the cost is too steep. Whatever creative ideas you would have arrived at through the traditional writing process will never occur to you, you won’t have the sense of ownership and understanding that comes with doing the work yourself, and your advocacy will suffer as a result.
Never try to pass off AI-generated text as authentic communication. AI prose is usually competent but shallow and mediocre, riddled with jargon and syntactic clichés. AI services can convey information in fluent, polished prose that is free of grammatical errors. But there is a difference between prose that is merely polished and prose that is compelling, that has a distinct style and voice capable of stirring and edifying those who read it, that can earn and deserve the attention of discerning human readers. Plus, as the word polish connotes, AI services’ imitations of human writing are often less impressive than they seem. The more knowledgeable a reader is on a topic, the more likely it is that they will find mistakes in AI-generated writing, and the less likely they are to find the AI’s work interesting or worthwhile.
Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, join one of Ryan’s writing workshops, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog, and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.
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