We’re starting strong with the most expensive power team member : legal aid.

I did a quick check and a lawyer in the UK for the sort of work we’ll be covering costs £250/hour (~$320).

If you are a growing business it’s hard to justify that. Thankfully there’s now an alternative.

We’ll look at how we can use AI for legal matters when building a business.

Let’s get started:

First up, the obvious legal disclaimer.

I’m not a lawyer. ChatGPT is not a lawyer. You should still seek legal advice when required.

What we’re talking about in this Part is using ChatGPT as a first step. And then continuing your legal work with a legal professional as and when required.

We’re also not talking about ChatGPT representing you in court or anything like that. We’re talking about using ChatGPT to help with low level legal inquiries and documentation - much like a paralegal would.

And here’s something legal companies probably don’t want you to know. A lot of their work is boilerplate.

Think about it. If a firm specialises in housing deals or employment contracts do you think they are writing each document from scratch each and every time?

Of course not!

They have boilerplate templates and they adjust them each time. ChatGPT isn’t much different here.

This is also partly why the legal industry is one of the most susceptible to AI automation (#2 with 44% of jobs exposed):

Let’s do this with a simple independent contractor agreement using ChatGPT.

We’re going to explore two techniques along the way: interviewing and iterative.

Interviewing

We’re doing this with a simple independent contractor agreement.

Here’s a prompt:

You are a legal expert helping me to prepare an [independent contractor agreement]

Interview me to collect all of the information you require to prepare this document.

ChatGPT is going to go ahead and barrage you with questions. Here’s the first half:

Provide all of the information required. Just as if you were doing this with a law firm.

Don’t know the answer to a question? Ask!

For example “How and when will payments be made?”. Let’s say we don’t know the answer here. I would ask “what’s the standard term in my industry?" and provide some information about my industry.

Once all the information has been collected give a follow up execution prompt:

Write up the agreement in full in standard legal language.

ChatGPT will go ahead and prepare a draft for you like so:

(This agreement has placeholders - yours will have the information provided).

Pretty damn good!

Iteration

So we’re all done and can send this off now right?

No! This is how people get in trouble with AI.

And this is going to be a legal document. So hold your horses.

What we’ll now do is a process of iterative improvement.

I’m going to copy the whole agreement and bring it to another chat.

Here’s the prompt:

Act as a legal expert. Review this [independent contractor agreement] and provide feedback
Specifically:
1. what is missing from this contract
2. what terms are unattractive for the first party
3. what terms are unattractive for the second party

[copy paste document]

ChatGPT will spin out feedback. Here’s what’s missing:

It will also highlight terms and clauses that are unattractive to each party. Here are the terms unattractive to the independent contractor for instance:

What you are getting here is a legal review of the document.

Go ahead and tell ChatGPT to make changes based on this feedback.

For the missing elements for example you might just say “add all these missing elements” and ChatGPT will redraft.

Once we’ve got a new draft we are going to do the same again.

We copy our new draft and use the prompt above again. Do this in a new chat. The analysis will be run and different problems will be highlighted.

Continue this process, refining iteratively, until the recommendations coming back are so minor it’s no longer worth the changes.

Finalising

At this point you’ll have a pretty tight document in place.

Depending on the importance of the document you can now send this draft to a legal firm for final checks.

Instead of paying a solicitor £250/hour for 10 hours of work (£2500) I’ll pay £250 for one hour of checking and confirmation.

I recently used this process and got back one very minor emendation from the lawyers. It seemed like they suggested the change because they felt a little silly not having anything to say…

Think wider

This is not about writing Independent Contractor Agreements.

The exact prompts being used isn’t important in this Playbook.

What’s important is what you are using AI on and how we can get better results through more advanced techniques.

In this Part we used a basic legal document as the example. You can expand this out to any legal document. As well as use it to analyse legal documents given to you by others. This is the broadening of usage horizons we are looking for.

Equally, the two techniques I’ve shown you (interview and iteration) aren’t only for legal work. They can be applied in any field. Want to write a blog article and don’t know how to start? Get ChatGPT to interview you. Then refine the piece by using iterative feedback and improvements.

By doing you move from a basic to an advanced user of AIs like ChatGPT.