Startup NC Law Clinic Director Shares Insight on ChatGPT and the Law
In the May issue, we began a series on ChatGPT and the legal field in which we interview professors in North Carolina law schools about artificial intelligence. Our first article in the series featured Diane Littlejohn and Jeff Ward. This August, for the second installment in the series, we spoke with Marjorie S. White, clinical professor of law and director of the Startup NC Law Clinic at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Marjorie White
White is also the director of Small Business Initiatives at the law school’s Institute for Innovation. The Institute houses three clinics which offer legal counsel to individuals who are beginning for-profit and nonprofit enterprises, and White’s clinic focuses on the for-profit side.
As technology advances, we are interested to learn more about ChatGPT and its capabilities even as we also are mindful of its limitations. After the first article in this series was published in the May issue, recent events in the news have continued to give pause to users of ChatGPT because of its potential for error, especially as it relates to the legal field.
ChatGPT garnered attention in late May when a New York attorney submitted a brief containing false case citations created by ChatGPT. In a later hearing, the two attorneys assigned to the case were fined $5,000 by Judge P. Kevin Castel of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Castel was not the only individual in the judiciary to underscore how important it is to check AI-generated information for accuracy. On June 2, 2023, U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas requested that attorneys who argue cases before him confirm that they have not used artificial intelligence in a filing without making sure the information is correct.
In the interview below, White discusses both the capabilities of ChatGPT and its drawbacks, as well as how she has addressed it in her work with students at the Startup NC Law Clinic.
White has a background in business law and expertise in leading transactional law clinics. Before joining UNC School of Law, White was associate professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School. There, she also served as director of transactional practice for the Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic from 2014-2019. She has experience in corporate, in-house roles and private practice, having spent much of her career doing mergers and acquisitions and securities work at Davis Polk & Wardwell. White holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and served with the Law Review as comment editor. After earning her law degree, she clerked for Judge Robert J. Ward, a U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University.
Our interview with White follows below.
You have experience teaching at the Brooklyn Law School and working as Director of Transactional Practice at the Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic before moving to NC in 2019 and joining the faculty at UNC Law. I would love to hear more about what drew you to this role.
This was a tremendous opportunity to help build out an exciting new program in a very dynamic and fast-growing area. The Startup NC Law Clinic represents startups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses in their business law needs. It is part of Carolina Law’s Institute for Innovation, serving clients in the Triangle and beyond, including many underserved communities. Overall, I would say that the hallmark of the clinic is its substantive breadth: we work with startups and small businesses in fields ranging from cupcakes to crypto! It’s extremely valuable pedagogically for students to work across the spectrum of North Carolina’s vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s also a lot of fun, and a daily pleasure and privilege to work with such dedicated students and colleagues.
Startup NC Law Clinic students pictured at an October 2022 Launch Chapel Hill event, where they met with startup founders who were members of Launch Cohort 21. White stands in the front row on the far left. Photo courtesy of Launch Chapel Hill.
As Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Startup NC Law Clinic, you teach and advise law students who will enter business, transactional and corporate fields of law. This program makes an impact on both entrepreneurs in NC and on students, who work with clients pro bono as they begin and develop their startups. What are some of the highlights of this program that you have seen over the past four years?
Every semester we have wonderful new students and clients, so there have been many, many highlights. By way of more background, the Startup NC Law Clinic provides a clinical learning experience for third-year law students who represent live clients with respect to a variety of business law needs, including such things as entity formation, operational documents, contracts, regulatory questions, and more. Our client base includes both tech startups as well as traditional “brick and mortar” small businesses and focuses primarily on startups and small businesses across the state that might not otherwise be able to afford legal representation.
One thing I am especially proud of is the work the students were able to carry on during the pandemic (almost all by Zoom), especially with small businesses in rural parts of the state. The clinic provided much-needed support during a very tough period in economically challenged areas. Closer to home, another real highlight for the students has been working with entrepreneurs at Launch Chapel Hill, the fantastic startup accelerator and community of innovators directed by Professor Tim Flood of the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Working with startups and small businesses can be quite difficult substantive work, especially because it tends to be multi-disciplinary. It is also frequently the case that a client’s business law needs and priorities are complex and require some untangling; I think students often find their work with our clients involves a certain amount of “unscrambling omelets”! Our students come into the clinic with a fantastic doctrinal education, and, as in all clinics, we give them practical hands-on training translating their knowledge into action.
In addition, UNC law students bring a deep pro bono ethic and commitment to their work. Some of them will be going to firms or companies with their own established pro bono programs in the entrepreneurship arena, and I have already heard from several clinic alums who are helping to establish new ones, so there is a lot of potential going forward to leverage their training and to add pro bono firepower for the entrepreneurs of North Carolina.
I would love to hear your thoughts on artificial intelligence and ChatGPT and the legal field and, in particular, how this new technology relates to business law. What are some of the ways AI might impact the field of business law, in terms of both its benefits and limitations?
Another great question! First and foremost, AI is a rapidly evolving area, so if you ask me this question even a few months from now I might have a very different answer! As with any new technology, it can sometimes take a little time for its best uses and applications to emerge. Secondly, this is just a vast area, even within the legal arena, with many different practical and policy implications, including both promises and pitfalls. But whether we like it or not, AI is with us, and that means that many of us who teach law must help prepare our students for a world in which AI plays an increasing role.
In the field of business law, probably the greatest benefit of AI programs for the practitioner is significant time-saving, even to the extent of making it possible to take on projects that one couldn’t otherwise do from a resource perspective. For example, software that “intelligently” searches through and summarizes hundreds of leases in the blink of an eye can save significant amounts of time and money. But whether these capabilities will, as they evolve and become better, be available at a price that is accessible to small and solo practices is an open question. And in larger-firm practices, it is equally unclear how other economics would play out, such as the extent to which corporate clients would expect any AI cost-savings to be passed on to them.
AI also offers the ability to generate documents quickly, but the generative aspects of AI are also the most problematic, at least with the current state of the technology, and the limitations can be pretty profound, depending upon the context and uses to which it is being put. For example, much has been written about the ”hallucinations” that programs like ChatGPT produce, which is a reference to material that it simply makes up.
In fact, there has been a fair amount of recent publicity about the attorney who got sanctioned by the court for unwittingly submitting a brief with case citations that had been completely fabricated by ChatGPT. (He had even asked ChatGPT if the cases were real, and it assured him they were!) My guess is that this case has had a duly sobering effect on the use of AI (or at least ChatGPT) by many firms and attorneys. But again, many people expect things will change and improve rapidly. And the fact is, many online legal research products have been using AI to a certain extent for some time, but in a more specialized context.
What approaches do you think the legal field should take toward these advances in artificial intelligence?
The most important thing is to approach it with caution, at least in the short term. We need to be mindful not only of the potential benefits of AI but also of the very real problems that have already been encountered. The most important thing to remember is that lawyers are always responsible for their work product and the advice they give; whether it’s a transactional document or a legal filing, it is ultimately the lawyer’s responsibility, however the work was originally created. And that means that lawyers who use AI – at least in its current state – need to take all reasonable steps to ensure that the product that is generated is accurate.
In addition, there have been a number of questions raised about client confidentiality and privacy concerns and AI, as well as bias issues, which all need to be carefully considered. Of course, the technology is changing rapidly, and subsequent versions may resolve these problems, but until they do some degree of caution is in order.
A student team in the Startup NC Law Clinic prepares for a client meeting at the School of Law’s Institute for Innovation. Left to right are Catherine Goodman ’23, Leighton Whitehead ’23, Corinne O’Reilly ’23, and Ian McAdoo ’23.
What are some ways that you have addressed artificial intelligence and ChatGPT with students in the Startup Clinic or in your classes and work with students?
Our work with artificial intelligence and ChatGPT to date has come up in the clinic in two primary ways, that is, in the work of our clients, and in the work for our clients. First, we have already spoken with startups who are working in this space, trying to use AI in the services and products they want to provide. Just as one example, generative AI has many helpful, natural applications in the educational technology space, such as self-education or self-testing products that interact with users based on their responses. There are also many really interesting startup products out there in the editing, self-publishing, and design areas, as well as startups that have created specialized “plug-ins” to make chatbots work more accurately in more specialized fields.
This is all only a tiny slice of the field, and I expect that more and more of our “app” clients will be deploying this technology in one way or another. AI is an exciting area in general to be involved with, and it provides challenging work for the students to think about on behalf of our clients, because there are some very basic and important legal questions that have not yet been completely sorted out, for example with respect to certain copyright, licensing, and ownership issues for generated content.
Second, I’d say that we have only just dipped our toe in the water with respect to using AI ourselves for our client deliverables, just to see how well it did in a few specific contexts, such as research and contract drafting. With respect to research, there is already so much information available online, and an experienced attorney can pretty quickly distinguish the wheat from the chaff. In some respects, ChatGPT and other AI products are just another resource students have to work with and learn about, including learning how to assess their reliability. For example, AI is already baked into various legal research products, but a search using one of them may yield far different results from those of a ChatGPT request.
At the clinic, we also tried using ChatGPT in a very limited experiment to see how well it did in generating drafts after-the-fact compared to the students’ own work, and the consensus thus far is that it was just so-so, but I hope we will continue to do a little more experimenting this year, hopefully with some more specialized products.
As you look ahead to 2023-24, are there changes on the horizon for the Startup NC program?
I am really looking forward to the new academic year starting up! Each semester, the students bring their own perspectives, backgrounds, and interests to the clinic, and we have new clients who are forging new businesses and innovations. In a very real sense, the clinic is like a little law firm that is reforming and changing every semester, which hopefully keeps the work challenging, meaningful, fun and exciting for everyone!
If you’d like to use the clinic’s services or ask any questions, you can reach them by email at [email protected].
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.