Human Judgment Required: The Ethics of Practicing Law in the Age of Generative AI

Lawyers today are navigating the most significant technological shifts in the history of legal practice. Generative AI tools are rapidly transforming how legal work is performed, from drafting and summarizing documents to research, due diligence, litigation strategy, and firm-wide knowledge management. While these technologies promise dramatic increases in efficiency and insight, they also introduce new ethical challenges tied to competence, confidentiality, accuracy, bias, and transparency.

Recent disciplinary cases involving fabricated citations, combined with evolving ABA guidance, underscore the heightened duty for lawyers to understand how AI works, where its limitations lie, and how to supervise its use appropriately. Questions around privacy, privilege, informed consent, data security, and algorithmic bias are no longer theoretical.  They are now central to everyday practice.

In this course, Mr. Koss will discuss:

1. The core distinctions between traditional AI and Generative AI, and how these technologies are being deployed across the legal industry
2. The ethical duties implicated by AI use, including competence, confidentiality, candor, communication, and reasonable billing practices
3. How lawyers can harness AI's benefits while preserving professional judgment and protecting clients
4. Real-world cases where lawyers were sanctioned for relying on AI-generated hallucinations
5. The risks of algorithmic bias, opaque "black box" reasoning, and limited contextual understanding in AI-generated legal outputs
6. Practical frameworks and best practices for using AI responsibly in litigation, transactions, and advisory work
7. Organization-level considerations, including policies, supervision, vendor management, and data-handling requirements.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Identify and explain the capabilities, limitations, and risks associated with Generative AI in the legal profession, including hallucinations, bias, confidentiality risks, and limited contextual understanding
2. Analyze the ethical duties triggered by AI use under the ABA Model Rules, including competence, confidentiality, supervision, informed client communication, candor to the tribunal, and billing fairness
3. Evaluate real-world cases where lawyers were sanctioned for improper reliance on AI-generated content and apply those lessons to prevent similar misconduct
4. Apply practical best practices and an ethical AI framework to safely integrate AI tools into legal workflows while maintaining professional judgment and protecting client data
5. Develop strategies for implementing firm-wide AI governance, including use policies, vendor evaluation, data protection considerations, staff training, and supervision of AI-assisted work