The Use of GenAI in the Legal Industry
A draft Bill is currently making the rounds in California in the United States. The Bill intends to provide attorneys, arbitrators, judicial officers, and alternative resolution providers with guidance on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their day-to-day work.
The Business and Professions Code now includes a new section, 6068.1
According to the Bill attorneys:
"shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)".
According to a Google search popular GenAI tools include ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
Complere View
You should not breach legal privilege without your client's prior consent. This means that you should inform your clients before inputting their information into an AI tool.
According to the Bill attorneys should:
"Not enter confidential, personal identifying, and other non-public information into a generative artificial intelligence system... Personal identifying information includes all the following:
- Driver’s license numbers.
- Dates of birth.
- Social security numbers.
- National Crime Information and Criminal Identification and Information numbers.
- Addresses and phone numbers of parties, victims, witnesses, and court personnel.
- Medical or psychiatric information.
- Financial information.
- Account numbers.
- Any other content sealed by court order or deemed confidential by court rule or statute."
Complere View
From a FATCA, CRS and CARF perspective, ID numbers, dates of birth, TINs, addresses, account numbers and financial information should not be inputted into publicly available AI tools as this action would breach the client’s data privacy.
The fact that financial information is mentioned as an exclusion when using GenAI, may provide some guidance for the accounting industry.
Other guiding principles provided in the Bill include:
- Verifying the accuracy of information provided by the GenAI;
- Correcting errors and hallucinations; and
- Disclosing the use of AI to the court.
Reference Source: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb574
Complere never uses AI to write opinions, nor do we input client information into AI tools.