Hinshaw General Counsel Steve Puiszis Discusses How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact the Legal System in 2025

February 10, 2025

Hinshaw general counsel Steve Puiszis was among three industry leaders asked by Mealey's Litigation Report: Artificial Intelligence to share insights on potential changes coming to the legal industry as a result of artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025. John Pavolotsky, co-chair of the Stoel Rives AI, Privacy & Cybersecurity team, and Richard Robbins, Reed Smith Director of Applied Artificial Intelligence, were also cited.

Specifically, Mealey's asked: "What will change in the next 12 months for lawyers, courts, and the legal system as a result of artificial intelligence?"

Puiszis responded:

In 2025, we will see an expansion in the use of GenAI, which will vary between firms depending on each firm's risk tolerance. Some firms will explore low-risk uses, whereas others will be more aggressive, and those with niche areas of practice will explore training a platform on its own data.

Expect that new ethical and professional potholes will continue to be recognized, such as the recent suggestion by a district court that lawyers may have an obligation under Rule 11 to inquire if an expert or a witness used Generative AI to prepare a report, an affidavit or a declaration by the witness. Firms will need to consider reviewing their protective orders to prevent a client's data from being reviewed by an LLM that will use it for training purposes. Lawyers and firms will need to consider what to include in engagement letters to obtain a client's informed consent in light of an ABA ethics opinion noting that boilerplate provisions will not suffice.

One issue that will not go away is hallucinations. While retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, will reduce hallucination rates, the latest study of LLMs from Stanford explains that RAG does not eliminate them. And many of the mistakes we will likely see will be nuanced and will require careful review and attention by lawyers.

Read a copy of the full report (PDF).

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