Why the Legal AI Revolution is Actually a Good Thing for Appellate Law ft. David Coale

Quotes:

1. "Half of my practice is writing learned intellectual briefs to courts and appeals. The other half is providing advice to very smart, very aggressive trial lawyers, often on the fly while they're at the courthouse when something comes up. I call it the drop in traffic, and it's absolutely fascinating because it keeps me from getting to Ivory Tower."
2. "You gotta get reps in to develop the skills, and that means writing whatever needs to be written, offering to do whatever. It's fundamentally a written practice, and you have to like writing and the process of sitting there and getting it done. If you like writing, you need to practice it to get better at it, and you need extra reps writing articles to hone those skills."
3. "What AI forces you to confront is what am I really adding as a human being to this? Certain parts of the briefing process now take a lot less time and energy than they used to, which frees me up to do more meaningful stuff. The net is a better product in the end because I'm spending my time on way more beneficial work than me digging around in a bunch of boxes."
4. "Generative AI is here to stay, and ChatGPT was released three and a half years ago, but the ChatGPT today is unrecognizable from what it was. In another four years, it's going to significantly impact society and the profession, with fewer new lawyers hired and overwhelming changes to what humans do in the legal system."