Copycat law: Can AI replace my expensive legal team?

Every law that has ever been created started with some creative, original thinking. Yet 99% of lawyers are copycat lawyers. Only 1% lead the pack -- 99% follow.

Now as many lawyers and their clients are turning to artificial intelligence to think, write and even argue, the gap between the creative and the copycat is widening even more.

For those turning to AI to be their lawyer, it's vital to understand that AI is, by its nature, a follower.

AI creates like a musician performing covers of another's hit songs. Most cover artists are never as good or successful as those artists they copy. The Beatles, for example, took the feelings, emotions and smells of the flowers of the moment and created unique music that is still successful and still copied today.

AI is not fresh and creative like The Beatles. It repeats programming. It is not organic. It is not alive, and it admits its own weaknesses and shortcomings. AI is data, comprised of our collective history and can regenerate anything from that historical data. Conversely, creativity works with evolution. It works with the way things change, not necessarily the way things were in the past. 

If your lawyer is relying on AI for creative thinking, they are anchored in the past and bound by historical contexts and positions. The inspiration you likely need from your lawyer to survive your personal war, where your freedom or your financial security, or both, are at stake, will be fundamentally limited. History rarely stands up the same way in the present as it did in the past, so it cannot always be counted on.

It would be a lot like putting an old man in a boxing ring at the hands of a young fighter. Having an old man in your corner is smart, much like it is wise to have AI in your corner to help bolster your new creative theories. But that old man reflecting old concepts won't win the boxing match against a young fighter, reflecting new, current concepts.

Current creative thinking developed AI, and it is benefiting lawyers and humanity in many exciting ways with its ability to make processes more efficient. It's like an expanded, hyper functional law library. Something our slow, overburdened sleepy judicial system certainly needs.

However, if you misunderstand AI as being the creative thinker for you, you already have your two feet in the quicksand. That is because AI is confined to the four corners of its code and the data of all the details that make up our continuing past.

AI, for example, can take colored blocks that have already been created and make different arrangements out of them. But it didn't create the blocks -- and no matter how AI arranges them, it can only use the blocks and colors it knows from its programmed history.

AI's output might look different and exciting, but it's still using the same blocks. AI simply won't have new colors to work with until the creative influence programs those newly created colors into that AI platform. So, your current needs for new colors, for example, are not in AI.

Using AI to take the creative thinker's place will always be limited to generating some copycat version or another. There is a profound difference between those who wrote the Constitution and those who simply cite it.

Creating and presenting legal arguments is a lot like creating a song. And like the musician that covers others' original works, covers are never as valuable as an original creation. Even cover artists are not very successful unless they bring some new creative juice to that older song.

In creation, no two minutes are the same, no two blades of grass are identical and certainly no two cases are exact. Creation doesn't copy.

Clients should want their lawyer to utilize new technologies, especially AI. But if your lawyer isn't also involving your case with an evolved, personal and creative perspective -- if they're not using that living intelligence beyond AI's capabilities and relying solely on copying old arguments -- they're leaving you dangerously exposed. That exposure arises the second a tuned in creative lawyer steps in, in harmony with the natural force that once created the very laws others now copy.

In that moment, the creative lawyer will defeat the copycat lawyer every time. It's just obvious objective logic.

While AI has tremendous value in preparing a case, it's important to remain objective and logical about that level of value AI can bring. It's the kind of value an old song maintains. People don't buy old songs like they did when they were new and just created. And an old song loses its place on the charts the moment a new song rises. Yet unlike songs on the charts, there is no second place in a legal case.