AI is ‘game-changer’ for legal field, but Mobile case highlights dangers

MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) - For Stephen Yeager, who owns a Theodore company that helps lawyers with digital forensics, research and jury consulting, artificial intelligence has been a “game-changer.”

What used to take hours now takes minutes.

“It’s a next-level tool, though,” said Yeager, owner of Divine Litigation Services. “I mean, it basically does stuff that no other tool can do, and in a very, very short amount of time – especially in regards to the legal field.”

But Yeager said a human needs to review anything an AI program produces.

“One of the AI ethics is, validate, validate, validate,” he said.

Even seasoned lawyers have stumbled using AI across the country. The most recent instance happened this week in Mobile, where a lawyer representing alleged drug “kingpin” Glennie Antonio McGee admitted to submitting a court filing created by a genitive AI program that cited “nonexistent” cases.

Yeager said he uses AI to help lawyers digest evidence, which in some cases, can run thousands of pages. He offers an example from the case of Marco Antonio Perez, who is on death row for killing a Mobile police officer. An issue in that trial was whether Perez knew the officer was a cop.

Yeager said Perez’s legal team received recordings of interviews with more than 70 witnesses. The AI converted them into transcripts, and then Yeager said he asked how many people had seen the officer’s badge and how many gunshots they heard.

“Within 30 minutes, we had the answer,” he said.

The technology is capable of higher-order analysis, Yeager said. He pointed to a large medical malpractice case he consulted on. He said he wanted to quickly spot references to knee surgeries in thousands of pages of medical records. He said the AI not only quickly returned two results but also – unprompted – flagged other possible references by recognizing the procedures by their five-digit current procedural technology codes listed in the documents.

Similarly, Yeager said, a van played a key role in a recent Mobile capital murder case. He said a query of the AI returned 13 mentions of a van and then also suggested taking a look at other mentions of “ban,” which the program concluded might be a typo in the written documents.

Lawyers are using the same powerful technology to help draft motions and other pleadings. The programs can do everything from finding precedents that support the lawyer’s argument to drafting the language, itself.

That is what lawyer James Johnson did in getting a Microsoft product based on the open-source ChatGPT to help draft a filing seeking to postpone McGee’s drug trial. But in responding, prosecutors found that some of those precedents were not real.

Yeager said there are many companies marketing inexpensive AI legal research programs that fall short of what they promise. He said more expensive programs, like those tied to Westlaw and Lexis, avoid that potential.

“It’s not Google. You know what I mean? … They have their own legal databases that they pull from, and their own modeling that that they have that kind of separates it from a ChatGPT open AI-style program,” he said.

But experts say even the best AI programs have potential drawbacks. Joe Patrice, senior editor at Above the Law, told FOX10 News that those programs will not make up cases but might misinterpret them.

“And that’s the nuanced stuff that even that the AI tries to smooth over,” he said. “And if you aren’t aware that it’s doing that, and know that you have to check it yourself, you can get burned.”

McGee likely won’t have to worry about this issue with his new lawyer, Jason Darley, who said he does not use AI.

“If I don’t read it with my own eyes, I don’t trust it,” he said.