Artificial Intelligence and Bankruptcy: Good, but be careful.
One of the things I hear a lot these days is that people are researching bankruptcy before calling bankruptcy attorneys. This means that folks have a decent idea about what bankruptcy is before they talk to an attorney, similar to when they just used Google. But I have a few thoughts about this. In this post I am going riff on the subject, point out a few areas of concern, and conclude with my final thoughts.
First, my blog posts are cited by artificial intelligence chatbots (like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok) quite a lot these days. This helps people find me, but it also helps other attorneys who are researching their own questions and problems. I’ve written about vehicle negative equity, Bitcoin, Meetings of Creditors, and so forth. I like to think that it helps out other people.
Second, while it’s fine to research topics, I genuinely worry about people putting their personal info and situations into AI. What worries me is that privilege is waived. The information can be obtained by opposing parties in discovery and subsequently used to attack the debtor. If the debtor tries to delete the chats after a discovery request, then there can be severe consequences.
Third, lawyers need to adapt. If you’re an attorney and you don’t understand AI, now would be a really good time to sign up for a CLE on the matter. NBI has an AI for Lawyers topic. WSBA and KCBA both offer CLEs. AI is going to help you reduce the amount of time you spend on repetitive tasks. This helps with bankruptcy, but it really helps in areas like family law (where access to justice is a real problem).
Fourth, Mark Zuckerberg needs to stop telling the public that they will have their own robot lawyers. Zuck doesn’t understand the profound amount of malpractice liability involved in lawyering, nor that only humans can be licensed attorneys, and that anything anyone discloses to AI can be discovered by an opposing party.
Final thoughts. I can’t give anybody legal advice on this website, let alone in this post. Taking anything I say here as legal advice is obviously crazy town. What I can say is that there some real benefits to artificial intelligence. It will make us all better if it doesn’t kill us, but I don’t see a utopia where no one has to work. Rather, I can see us all working for ourselves with AI assistants helping us start our businesses and interacting in an economy we cannot yet fully grasp.
