Letter from the Editor

The recently-formed Standing Committee on Artificial Intelligence & the Practice of Law envisions its role as educating the members of the Illinois State Bar Association. Generative Artificial Intelligence is not the first new technology to present lawyers with the opportunity to harness new tools to enhance their practices and serve their clients better.

With every new technology, be it word processing, facsimile, e-mail, or e-filing, there are both opportunities as well as potential peril. Lawyers tend to see the negatives, tend to be conservative, and are often late-adopters to new tech as a result.

You can forgive attorneys in 2025 for harboring more skepticism than past generations as the technology becomes more obscure and increasingly distant from easy analogy. A “fax” was just a picture of a document sent over telephone lines (that even lawyers were comfortable with by the 1980’s). E-mail was a memo that could be sent without writing, typing, printing, or physical delivery.

And while attorneys have been using machines that incorporated ‘artificial intelligence’ for years, generative AI that creates or analyzes documents based upon a ‘large language model’ (“LLM”) is seen by many as a “black box.” Even if you personally enter the prompts, you cannot “see,” much less comprehend, the breadth of source material the generated responses are based upon. To say nothing of the incredibly sophisticated computing that harnessed that material and created the output.

It raises ethical questions related to billing, research, and attribution along with questions about data security for privileged materials. But we address many of these threshold questions in this initial issue of the Committee’s newsletter. Crossing that threshold, the next question is: How can you use this?

This Committee is dedicated to providing insight and guidance to help answer that question. But something that is beyond question as we distribute our first edition and the dawn breaks on the practice of law in a new era: You will use it. Your practice and your clients will demand it.