Are Attorneys Obsolete?

Jenner & Block partner Adam Unikowsky, who is considered a superstar of the next generation of Supreme Court attorneys and who is very tech savvy did an experiment.

He asked an AI to answer the same questions he was asked by the supremes when he argued Williams v. Reed last fall.

Unikowsky got both undergrad and graduate degrees from MIT and then went to Harvard law, so he is both a geek and an overachiever.

While Adam won his case last year, he said that the chatbot would have won also and came up with better syntax and citations.

Adam said that if you read his transcript, he got caught up and made some mistakes.

The AI didn’t make any mistakes and tied its answers back to the central them of the case.

He said “I don’t want to put myself down too much — I do have bills to pay as a practicing lawyer,” Unikowsky joked Tuesday. “But I think many of its answers were as good or better than mine.”

Then he made AI sound like him and present the oral version of him arguing the case. The audio of him and the AI are in the article.

He said he was inspired by a 2023 offer of $1 million to any attorney would would deliver a Supreme Court argument by wearing earbuds and just echoing what the AI lawyer told him to say. That was the dark ages of AI (2023).

He concluded that today an AI lawyer would be an above-average Supreme Court advocate.

Soon it will be better than the best human oral advocates.

At that point will you still feel the need to pay an attorney a thousand or two thousand dollars an hour? There don’t seem to be a lot of rules against doing this, so expect this to happen soon.

He also says that ill-prepared and stressed-out lawyers are already using AI during during remote hearings.

Credit: Law360

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