University of Kwazulu-Natal

267 Ai First Drafts What Your Clients Aren T Telling You And Why It

Bonisiwe Shabane
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267 ai first drafts what your clients aren t telling you and why it

Hello to all 8128+ of you from around the globe. This edition is about the fast growing “AI First Draft Dilemma” and what lawyers need to start doing and asking to save their a$$. See a helpful checklist at the end. You open the document your client just sent over. It looks polished. The formatting is clean.

The tone is confident. It's even structured like a solid legal memo. A few key facts are wrong. The structure, while familiar, doesn’t actually match the client's real situation. And there are a few assertions that sound plausible—but just don’t hold up under scrutiny. You suspect this wasn't drafted by a human.

Or at least not entirely. Clients who use AI to generate draft legal documents are posing new challenges — and potential risks — for their attorneys, warns Indiana University Law Prof. Josh Kubicki, a legal tech expert. “Most clients aren’t disclosing when they’ve used AI,” Kubicki writes in the latest edition of his Brainyacts newsletter. “And even when they do, they often forget the more important part: what they told the AI to get the draft.” From ordinary citizens to “sophisticated in-house counsel,” clients are increasingly using AI to create first drafts of contracts, memos, emails, issue spotters, and litigation narratives, Kubicki writes.

That could pose a serious risk, Kubicki warns. Fractional Executive | Entrepreneur | Professor | Author of Brainyacts AI newsletter - pragmatic use of AI for legal professionals You just received a draft from a client. It looks solid. Structured like a proper legal memo. The tone is confident.

It even name-drops some legal principles. But a few things are off. Some facts don’t line up. Some logic doesn’t follow. And the phrasing… it’s a little too perfect. You’re 90% sure it was written by AI.

You’re 100% sure the client didn’t tell you that. Welcome to the new reality of legal work: the AI First Draft. Whether it’s a pro se litigant or a Fortune 500 GC, clients are using generative AI to create legal work product before you ever get looped in. That’s not inherently a problem. But the implications are growing — fast. In this new edition of my newsletter, I break down the three risks lawyers need to start planning for now:\n What your client may have disclosed to the AI tool — and why it...

How AI’s confident tone is creating subtle but serious tension in lawyer-client relationships. Why reviewing an AI draft may cost more, not less — and how to communicate that clearly. And yes, I included a short checklist lawyers can use with clients when these situations come up. You’ll find the link to the full post in the comments. Fractional Executive | Entrepreneur | Professor | Author of Brainyacts AI newsletter - pragmatic use of AI for legal professionals Link to the full edition: https://thebrainyacts.beehiiv.com/p/267-ai-first-drafts-what-your-clients-aren-t-telling-you-and-why-it-matters

Legal Operations Executive | Strategy & Transformation | Knowledge Management & Data Literacy | Risk, Compliance & Contract Management | Technology Enablement Created in consultation with practicing litigation attorneys. Draft sophisticated litigation documents in minutes with simple point-and-click workflows. No prompting or technical knowledge required. Let First Drafts be your reliable assistant for all your litigation needs. Cutting-edge intelligent AI reads your documents in seconds.

Draft litigation documents of all types. Create a response to litigation documents from another party. Where lawyers get their pragmatic AI tips and news No AI BS. Just the latest insight—straight to your inbox, for free. Lawyers, take note: Josh Kubicki delivers a sharp reality check on the growing trend of client-generated content via genAI.

More clients are creating and sending AI-drafted first passes to their counsel—believing it will cut costs. Think again. From personal experience, I know that navigating client fee expectations can be a winding road. Josh outlines the hidden risks and offers practical strategies to navigate this new terrain affected by AI. His full post is well worth the read, and the checklist at the end is especially useful. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/eaW5ub43

Co-Founder at Law School AI | Business Attorney Absolutely worth the read. AI first drafts are changing client expectations fast. Josh nails both the risk and the remedy. Attorney, Founder & CEO | Aviation Attorney and CEO @ Lightning Law | Legal Tech Innovator | Adjunct Professor | Dedicated to Expanding Access to Justice | Passionate about Safer Skies Understanding the hidden risks AI is essential and so is using AI.

I hate to see attorneys who are paralyzed with fear and just avoid AI altogether. Law firms with a no AI use policy need to dig deeper and understand how to put up guardrails. Here are seven things your client isn’t telling you: You do good work for my company. You haven’t done enough to help me personally. In fact, you’ve never even asked me about my individual concerns or goals.

You haven’t brought me a new idea in a very long time. It is critically important for me to prove my business acumen when I’m working within my company. And you perform your work with attention to the legal issues rather than the business implications of your legal work. You don’t know my industry, and you don’t participate in it. As a CEO, you know that understanding your ideal customer is crucial for success. But let’s face it… customers aren’t always telling you the whole truth.

In fact, they might not even be aware of their deepest desires, hesitations, and underlying motivations themselves. So… how are you supposed to tell to them? Traditional market research often falls short because it relies on what customers are willing or able to articulate. But the real gold lies in the unspoken – those secret wants, doubts, and motivations that your customers wish you knew about but won’t (or can’t) outright tell you. In our last post, we announced First Drafts' upcoming AI Panel System, a trio of specialized AI models – Holmes, Ginsburg, and Marshall – designed to give you a richer, more diverse set of... We talked about why "perfect" AI legal drafting is a moving target, especially given the inherent subjectivity of persuasive language.

Today, we want to pull back the curtain further and show you how we evaluate these intelligent systems. Understanding our rigorous process will not only give you confidence in our tools but also empower you to choose the best AI "mind" for your specific task. After all, knowing the strengths and nuances of each model is key to leveraging them effectively. If each AI model brings a unique "perspective," how do we measure and understand those differences? We've developed a comprehensive evaluation framework that goes beyond simple accuracy scores. It’s designed to capture the subtle, yet critical, distinctions that matter in legal drafting.

Our core evaluation, as previewed when discussing model selection, uses a custom AI system to comparatively assess litigation document drafts in ten fixed test cases ranging in complexity and tasks across several key dimensions: This AI-driven comparative analysis gives us a nuanced understanding of how each model performs in constructing the substance and style of a legal argument. But we don't stop there. How will people compose text moving forward, now that every author working with a digital word processor and internet access can use generative AI? Many will likely opt to write traditionally as they did before, but some will use AI in partnership to draft. At this point, the methods a writer uses to develop a first draft feel like a dealer’s choice dilemma—ask AI to generate the draft for you, or bring some of your writing to the...

If students use AI in their drafting process, I’m increasingly drawn toward advocating for the latter method. I don’t like the idea of students going to AI and prompting a first draft. I know some have argued that this could be a helpful method to fight the blank-page anxiety most writers feel. Others view this as helping maturing writers by giving them a template or outline to help them organize and scaffold their ideas. I think there may be some value in those approaches, especially in terms of helping struggling students who might otherwise balk at writing, but all of these approaches assume a maturing writer will then... Those of us who’ve taught first-year writing likely raised a questioning eyebrow at that idea.

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Hello To All 8128+ Of You From Around The Globe.

Hello to all 8128+ of you from around the globe. This edition is about the fast growing “AI First Draft Dilemma” and what lawyers need to start doing and asking to save their a$$. See a helpful checklist at the end. You open the document your client just sent over. It looks polished. The formatting is clean.

The Tone Is Confident. It's Even Structured Like A Solid

The tone is confident. It's even structured like a solid legal memo. A few key facts are wrong. The structure, while familiar, doesn’t actually match the client's real situation. And there are a few assertions that sound plausible—but just don’t hold up under scrutiny. You suspect this wasn't drafted by a human.

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Or at least not entirely. Clients who use AI to generate draft legal documents are posing new challenges — and potential risks — for their attorneys, warns Indiana University Law Prof. Josh Kubicki, a legal tech expert. “Most clients aren’t disclosing when they’ve used AI,” Kubicki writes in the latest edition of his Brainyacts newsletter. “And even when they do, they often forget the more importa...

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It even name-drops some legal principles. But a few things are off. Some facts don’t line up. Some logic doesn’t follow. And the phrasing… it’s a little too perfect. You’re 90% sure it was written by AI.