“Then I kind of got into developing software myself. I’ve got a legal tech product called mode.law. So, I’ve rolled up my sleeves and had a go at software development. Not that I can code, but I know people that can.

“And so, I think that really, just my whole ethos is there must always be a better way to do something. So, when it came to trying out AI, I thought, ‘Is there a better way that I can do my job?’ And the answer was yes. And increasingly, it will be yes with some caveats on that and some pitfalls that we all need to try and avoid,” he said.

“I came from working for larger firms where the machinery of the large practice itself can sometimes be frustrating to work around. So, there’s a particular way that you have to do things, and they may not be the way that you think is the most efficient. And if you see opportunities for improvement, it’s very difficult to get those implemented. Maybe it’s just part of my personality, but I like to always be able to fix something that I see is broken or could at least be improved. And that’s something that I feel like I can do a lot better in private practice on my own.”

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This kind of thinking means that Mr Guttenbeil runs a “very efficient practice” and has incorporated various new technologies and tools to help drive efficiencies in his practice.

“I have a legal portal for each of my retainer clients where they can submit job requests, and I collect all the information I want at the front of the job so I’m not having to send emails back and forth. That kind of thing. So, a lot of that is just dovetailed into, OK, so that’s the first part of the process. What’s the next part of the process? How do I deliver on that work?” he said.

“Also, things like how do I get better at proofreading my own documents? I tend to work on my own, and being able to sit down and find a better way to make sure that I’m not missing anything, is there a tool out there that can help me do that? Is there a tool that helps me make sure that I’m not missing any cross-references in a document? Something like that. It’s a complex job that we do, and there are so many little things that we kind of take for granted because we’ve just done them and we’ve tried to get better at them over time, and you don’t really see them as a process in and of themselves. I try to see what processes there are to improve the workflow.”

This came after Mr Guttenbeil started exploring different technologies and platforms – and subsequently realising he could solve problems he didn’t know existed.

“I had been keeping an eye on the news, hearing all the rumblings of, this new ChatGPT tool is, that’s it. This is the actual moment where AI comes for the lawyers’ jobs. So that was off to one side. And then, I used a note-keeping and wiki tool called Notion, and they offered a new feature that they mentioned, early access. And I was impressed with what it could do,” he explained.

“So, it was really just toe in the water, and then curiosity kicked in, what else can it do? How far can I push it? And then next thing I know, I’m looking at more complex tasks that the AI can perform for actual legal practice, for drafting, proofreading, drafting of emails, checking references, all these kinds of things that we do, which are actually at the heart of delivery. I started trying it out more on those kinds of things, and was both surprised and a little bit worried.”

This worry encompassed the issue of hallucination in AI, wherein AI will create information out of thin air that isn’t factual – and provided Mr Guttenbeil with a number of lessons.

“AI is not a search engine. That’s what I kind of gleaned from it, and I think that that’s probably my first big tip for other lawyers that are looking to try using AI as if it’s not a search engine. It doesn’t actually know anything. It has been trained to do a particular task, which is effectively word calculation. It just predicts the next word that’s going to come in a sentence. You give it a prompt, it will try and solve it like a calculator would solve a mathematical problem,” he said.

“So, I was kind of shocked by that because I wasn’t expecting it. I hadn’t heard anything about it. I mean, I really didn’t know anything about AI at this stage. I’m just trying it out. So that was a big worry for me. And then I saw a couple weeks later that there was a case in America where two lawyers got dragged over the coals for not checking those case citations and insisting that they existed because they felt that it was beneficial to their case.”

However, delving further into AI also came with excitement in terms of the efficiencies it could create.

“AI engines, you might describe them as in the back end, but they’re a closed loop. So, one of the big fears is that the information that we are putting in as prompts, or if we’re setting an AI loose on a legal document, that they might use that information for training and then breach IP or confidentiality. So, I went looking for closed AIs that did specific things for lawyers, and one of those is a plugin for Word. And what it does is it analyses the document and then might make some suggestions on improvements, but it can also draft to prompt.

“It’s not just giving something that it’s found somewhere else on the internet. It’s looking at the document that’s in front of it; it’s seeing what other defined terms are in there. It kind of understands what you’re trying to achieve in this particular instance. And it might not be perfect, but it will be very close most of the time. And that moment was where I was shocked and excited by the possibility of speeding up my drafting and review process,” Mr Guttenbeil added.

“I think at this front-end period where we’re trying it out, it’s like it’s exciting to do something you’ve always done in a new way, learning how to use these tools, and then being surprised at the outputs that it gives you. Eventually, that excitement, I’m sure, will wear off, but I think we should all be a little bit excited about getting more efficient and being able to focus more on the other areas of our practice that we enjoy doing or that have better returns for us.”