Extract from Zach Sousa’s article “Tips for Writing Effective Legal Prompts”
Lawyers don’t need to become prompt engineers to get the most out of generative AI.
Crafting effective prompts requires skills lawyers have been honing all along: logic and reasoning, attention to detail, and clear communication. The beauty of GenAI tools like EverlawAI Assistant Coding Suggestions — which evaluates documents and suggests codes for them to speed up the review determinations process — is that instructing it is much like debriefing a human colleague.
Both require context, guidance, and clear expectations about the desired outcome. Lawyers need to learn how to write effective prompts because the effectiveness of these tools hinges on the quality of the instructions they receive.
In “Best Practices for AI Prompting,” an Everlaw community webinar, legal pros learned tips for how to instruct Coding Suggestions for the best results. The program covered using precise language to describe the context and the task, iterating on prompts to improve the results, and how to combine Coding Suggestions with Predictive Coding to make document review even more efficient.
