Don’t Boies Schiller your brief—”Read all your cases!” says AI Legal Writing Prof. Jayne Woods

Few lawyers and LRW instructors write and think more about AI than Professor Jane Woods of Mizzou Law, who offers this most important AI advice: If you haven’t read the case, don’t cite the case.

• The Boies Schiller Cautionary Tale: That would have saved Boies Schiller’s bacon. We discuss the high-profile Scientology/Masterson appeal, and whether the Court of Appeal is going to strike plaintiff’s respondent’s brief because of the Boies Schiller attorneys hallucinated cases and otherwise wrong legal citations.
• AI's Ideal Applications: Most effective AI uses include drafting standard legal sections, style polishing, fact organization, and processing large records.
• How to AI in Legal Practice: Avoid garbage-in-garbage-out by feeding case opinion PDFs from authoritative legal databases directly into AI projects—don’t let AI search the internet on its own.
• Don’t hate the "Em Dash"! Some firms have reportedly banned em dashes in legal writing because they're seen as indicators of AI-generated text, highlighting how AI's stylistic preferences (even good ones!) may be reshaping legal writing conventions.
• Should lawyers disclose AI use? It depends. But if you’re thinking about charging $900/hour and to outsource to a robot, maybe don’t do that.

Jeff thinks our business and even this podcast will be aped by robots by this time next year. Until then, tune in for tips on how best to resist or suck up to the robot overlords.