One of the newest chatbots, ChatGPT, is disrupting every industry – including law. Discover all your firm needs to know about this here. 

ChatGPT became available to the public in November 2022 and since then has broken records and crossed the 1 million users mark within one week of launching. It surpassed giants like Netflix and Twitter regarding usage adoption. Take a look at the findings: 

 

Source

And more law firms are adopting AI (artificial intelligence) tools to transform their business in

many areas, including:

• • Mergers & acquisitions 
  • Legal procedures
  • Contract reorganizing 
  • Legal document analysis 

What’s ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT is a variant of the popular language model GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) that has explicitly been fine-tuned for generating human-like text in a chatbot setting.

Like GPT-3, ChatGPT is trained on a massive dataset of human-generated text, but it has been further adapted to be more fluent and natural in conversation. With these enhancements, the variant can:

• Answer your questions and queries 
• Provide information
• Engage in small talk, all while maintaining a natural, human-like style of communication

Why Should Firms Care About ChatGPT? 

One of the biggest legal marketing trends in 2023 is AI. Specifically, moving from generative AI to explainable AI tools. We’ll briefly recap the difference: 

• In 2022 the “it” thing behind AI was tools generating, e.g., text to an image. (This is still relevant!) 
• In 2023, AI incorporates text-to-text and images/videos into text-to-anything! 

With this shift and ChatGPT entering the public market, there’s no better time to leverage this new popular model. 

Try ChatGPT Here 

Best Practices for ChatGPT: 

ChatGPT won’t turn you into the best content writer of all time, but it’ll facilitate your firm’s research and writing processes. We’ll provide 3 best practices to help you get started:

1. When looking into a particular niche, start by explaining to ChatGPT who it must become to answer. 
   • For example: “You are a legal copywriter with expertise in personal injury law.” 
2. Now, give it a task to perform. ChatGPT is excellent at rapid ideation, so don’t be afraid to ask for expert advice and creative solutions.
   • For example: “Create an actionable plan in a list for a legal copywriter looking to sell personal injury services.”
     
3. Don’t be afraid to ask out-of-the-box questions. (Think back to things you usually wouldn’t search on the web.) 
4. • For example: “You are a legal copywriter with expertise in personal injury law. Create a 5-pointer how-to guide showing the best practices behind legal copywriting.”

If we plug this into the chatbot, it’ll provide an answer. Like this: 

We want to clarify that ChatGPT can help to an extent. However, it relies on the data it can find, and for now, its knowledge base ended in 2021. Nonetheless, feel free to explore and leverage its capabilities, as this could facilitate any process from email drafting to blogging, etc. 

For more information about prompts, feel free to look into the different types of commands here. 

In addition, we’d like to point out that there are no references. Therefore, the user doesn’t know what publication, article, or website it pulls answers from. This is why it’s paramount you still do the content quality assurance yourself, especially in the legal field.  

ChatGPT is a powerful and flexible language generation model developed by OpenAI. It can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as generating human-like text, answering questions, and summarizing information. It’s well-suited for use in chatbots, virtual assistants and other applications that require a high level of natural language understanding. 

ChatGPT is creating a buzz around the world and has disrupted practically every industry. For example, you can pump out essays, blogs, and articles in seconds. This is powerful, and big tech corporations are taking note. Specifically, Microsoft is set to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. 

Why is Microsoft investing in ChatGPT? 

• A bet on ChatGPT will help boost Microsoft’s efforts in web search (which is currently dominated by Google). 

What does this mean for the average user? 

• With Microsoft’s current investment, there’s a chance ChatGPT will be monetized and users like you and I will have to pay in order to leverage it. For now, it is still running for free. 

Whether it’s going to be monetized in the near future or not, many are noticing the potential behind it, including us! According to the director of ROI at Consultwebs, Grant Brott, the platform holds great potential for users as well as some pitfalls. 

The Potential of ChatGPT

ChatGPT has the potential to generate human-like responses and automate some repetitive tasks.

From an efficiency standpoint, it can drastically reduce some of the research and ideation part of the writing process as it automatically generates text based on the prompts written. Because it can generate human-like text, it’s important to know what kind of prompts will generate the best responses. 

Usually, the best prompts tend to: 

• Be specific, clear, and concise 
• Request a specific action. (For samples, check out this ChatGPT Prompts Repository)
• Be written with clear grammar in a way AI can understand 
• Contain descriptions/ examples 

The Pitfalls of ChatGPT

One of the main pitfalls of using ChatGPT for a law firm’s marketing strategy is that it is a language model, not a legal expert. While it can generate human-like responses, it does not have the same level of knowledge and understanding as a lawyer. 

Besides that, there are 2 main challenges associated with ChatGPT: 

1. ChatGPT creates text that at times can be erroneous. Thus, the plagiarism aspect poses a challenge for those fully leaning on ChatGPT for content creation. 
   • As an example, we ran a piece of content written by ChatGPT through a checker and it was 30% plagiarized – this is high risk.
2. In the beta version of ChatGPT, OpenAI acknowledges the chatbot’s limitations, including the fact that it can generate incorrect information or biased content.
   
   
3. ChatGPT creates content that is highly recognizable as AI-generated content and Google is on the lookout for this.
   

 

To counterattack such issues and sustain quality, we maintain an in-house team of legal editors as well as licensed attorneys that constantly review all written content. At this time, we do not fully employ AI to create content for our law firm clients.

Takeaway 

In conclusion, ChatGPT is a powerful tool that has both potential and pitfalls. But overall, it is a powerful chat where we humans can have an actual conversation of sorts with ChatGPT.

If you’re looking to amp up your firm’s customer service, and integrate new marketing strategies – we’re here to help.