Extract from Michael T. Murray’s article “AI in Litigation Support: Balancing Efficiency With Ethics”
The rise of artificial intelligence promises to influence the practice of law by introducing new technologies that may alter traditional methods of legal practice. This shift is particularly evident in the domain of legal research, where AI-driven tools are streamlining tasks such as document review, case law analysis and deposition evaluation by quickly delivering efficiently distilled insights. Yet the real development isn’t simply in using AI; it’s in knowing how to talk to it. Effective prompt engineering—or how you ask for what you need—has quickly become a strategic skill for lawyers determined to master the future of their craft.
A Brief History
AI’s roots go back further than many realize. Early experiments in natural language interaction, like the ELIZA chatbot of the 1960s, showed that people readily engaged with computers in dialogue. Fast-forward to 1997, and IBM’s Deep Blue shocked the world by defeating a chess grandmaster, demonstrating machine capabilities in problem-solving. The true inflection point for language, however, came with Google’s breakthrough 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which paved the way for modern large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Why does this matter for lawyers? Because today’s LLMs, trained on vast swaths of legal, technical and plain-English data, don’t just match keywords: they process patterns that assume the meaning, context and nuance of your query. This unlocks research capabilities that are not just faster, but often more comprehensively precise than legacy methods.
