Artificial intelligence has already moved beyond legal curiosity and into the ordinary machinery of law practice. Lawyers use AI to summarize discovery, draft memoranda, prepare deposition outlines, analyze contracts, review privilege, generate marketing copy, staff client intake, create billing narratives, evaluate litigation risk, translate documents, prepare timelines, search firm knowledge bases, and communicate with clients. Used carefully, AI can reduce cost, improve access, accelerate repetitive tasks, identify patterns in large datasets, and help lawyers deliver more useful advice. Used carelessly, it can fabricate law, disclose client confidences, violate protective orders, generate misleading advertising, distort billing practices, create unauthorized-practice problems, and convert a routine filing into a sanctions hearing.

This CLE course examines AI in the legal process from the lawyer’s point of view. It begins with the promise of AI in legal research, drafting, discovery, due diligence, contract review, litigation analytics, billing, client intake, and marketing. It then turns to the failures that have made “hallucination” a legal term of art, including fabricated cases, invented quotations, fake secondary sources, defective expert declarations, and court filings that courts have found sanctionable. The program analyzes the duties of competence, confidentiality, communication, candor, supervision, fees, advertising, and unauthorized practice under the ABA Model Rules and state ethics opinions.

The program also treats AI as a data-protection and cybersecurity issue. Lawyers must understand what information is being placed into an AI system, whether the system trains on prompts, whether data is retained, whether vendors can access client material, whether information is leaving the United States, whether the tool is being used in violation of a protective order or client guideline, and whether a security incident involving an AI vendor or AI workflow triggers ethical, contractual, statutory, or regulatory disclosure obligations.

The course concludes with practical governance: how to build a law-firm AI policy, how to classify AI tools by risk, how to preserve privilege, how to disclose or avoid disclosing AI use, how to verify citations and quotations, how to bill ethically for AI-assisted work, how to supervise nonlawyers and vendors, and how to use AI in marketing without misleading prospective clients.