AI Doesn't Have a Bar Number. You Do.
A 100-document production used to eat a paralegal's afternoon. It took me ten minutes and a refilled coffee.
AI Doesn’t Have a Bar Number
TL;DR: The bar moved while everyone was arguing about whether to use AI. The real exposure now sits in the gap between using AI and using it well, and the attorneys closing that gap right now are setting the standard the rest of the profession gets measured against. I’m running a workshop for family law attorneys next weekend on what closing that gap looks like, and the four rules I’m giving them are the same four rules every practice group needs.
Where this actually leaves us
I’m running a workshop for family law attorneys next weekend. The slide I keep rewriting is the one that explains why any of us will be in the room at all.
Here’s where we actually are. Mata v. Avianca was not the last sanction. Fabricated citations keep showing up in pleadings. The discipline is public, the names are searchable, and the malpractice carriers are paying attention. And avoidance isn’t safe anymore. Opposing counsel are using these tools, clients increasingly assume you are too, and refusing to engage doesn’t insulate you from malpractice exposure. Using AI badly is what gets attorneys sanctioned. Not using it at all is what gets firms left behind. The bar associations are moving with the technology, not against it. Technology competence is part of the duty of competence in more states every year. The standard is no longer whether you use AI. It’s whether you use it well.
That’s what the workshop is about. Four rules.
Privacy first.
Commercial accounts only. If the material is privileged, it stays on the commercial side of the line: the side that doesn’t train on your inputs and gives you retention controls. Consumer accounts (free or personal ChatGPT, personal Claude, consumer Gemini) train on what you paste by default. They keep it for years. No BAA. Not HIPAA-eligible. If you wouldn’t email a deposition exhibit to a Gmail account you share with your kid’s soccer coach, don’t paste it into one of these tools.
Match the tool to the actual work.
Most of what attorneys do with AI still happens in a chat window. Quick question, paste a paragraph, get a draft. That’s fine for one-off tasks. But the bigger leverage is happening elsewhere. Tools like Cowork can work across entire folders: renaming files, converting formats, applying Bates numbers, building indexes. A chat window can’t do that. If you’ve never actually watched one of these tools tear through a real folder of real files, you’re judging the technology by the wrong interface.
Work in Projects, not one-off chats.
Treat a Project like a matter file with a paralegal who has already read every page. Upload the pleadings, the financial production, the deposition transcripts, the prenup. Set the standing instructions once. Every conversation inside that Project draws from the same baseline. The next time the matter heats up, you don’t burn ninety minutes on a Sunday morning reconstructing the asset picture. The new associate doesn’t need to be re-briefed on the family tree. The Project remembers. The team builds on top of it.
Prompt with intent.
Context, objective, role, examples. Ten seconds of structure on the front end saves an hour of cleanup on the back end. Treat the AI like a smart associate who will do good work if you brief it the way you’d brief any smart associate. Vague in, vague out.
What this looks like in one matter
Here’s the example I’m betting will land hardest with the room.
New case lands. Big production. A hundred-plus financial documents come in as a mix of PDFs, scanned exhibits, photographed pages, and Word files with whatever names the producing party felt like using. Welcome to discovery. Standard practice is to hand it to an associate or a paralegal who spends the better part of a day renaming files, converting them to PDFs, putting Bates numbers on every page, and building an index in Word.
I pointed Cowork at the folder. One set of instructions: standardize the names into a common structure, convert everything to PDF, stamp Bates numbers in sequence, build the index. Then I walked away.
Ten minutes later the folder was done. Every file renamed, converted, Bates-stamped in order, and accompanied by a clean Word index.
Run the math. Four to six hours of associate or paralegal time, the kind you actually bill, compressed into the time it took me to refill my coffee. Multiply that across a year of matters and across a firm. The number gets serious.
And the work product is better, not worse. The naming is consistent. The Bates numbering doesn’t skip. The index doesn’t have a typo because nobody got tired on page seventy-three.
The rule that has no exceptions
AI has no malpractice insurance. No reputation to protect. No career built case by case. You do.
So the one rule I won’t bend on, and the one I’m going to make sure every attorney in the room hears twice, is this: human review happens after the final AI modification, not before. Not after the first draft. After the final draft. Every change the AI made, including the ones it made quietly in a paragraph you didn’t ask it to touch, gets a human read before anything goes out.
That rule sounds obvious until you watch how people actually use these tools. They review the first AI output, ask for a revision, glance at the revision, and ship it. The error that gets you sanctioned is almost always in a revision the attorney barely read. Because they’d already signed off on the version before it.
Final read on the final version. No exceptions.
What to do Monday morning
If you run a practice group or a firm, three moves matter more than the rest right now.
Audit your accounts. Right now. Find out which of your attorneys are still dropping client material into consumer-tier accounts. Move them to commercial-tier today, even if you haven’t finalized your firmwide policy. The privacy bleed is happening while you write the policy.
Pick one matter and turn it into a Project. Not a pilot program. One matter. One sub-practice lead, one matter, one Project. See what happens in a month. The conversation about firmwide adoption gets easier when you’ve already seen what good looks like inside your own walls.
Make the final-review rule a written standard. Human review after the final AI modification, not before. Put it in the policy. Put it in the training. Make it the one sentence every attorney can recite.
One last thing
These tools are as dumb right now as they’ll ever be for the rest of your career. The standard is being set right now by the attorneys learning to use them well. Everyone else will be measured against that standard whether they signed up for the test or not.
The attorneys figuring this out right now aren't the ones with the most tools. They're the ones who decided to learn what good looks like before the standard hardened around them. If you're working through any of this inside your firm, the privacy audit, the first Project, the final-review rule, reach me at steve@intelligencebyintent.com. The standard is being written this year, and you want your name on it.