the Zealous

Silences
Lee Warner Brooks

Lawyers learn to listen to what wasn’t
said—as well as how to not‑say what
should not be said; a ready wit that doesn’t
aid your case is best kept quiet. But

this cannot mean a colloquy of lawyers
can be silent—we by nature speak
incessantly—because as legal warriors
whose sole weapon is the word, we seek

In Sally Mclaren & Lily Rowe, “You’re right to be skeptical!”: The Role of Legal Information Professionals in Assessing Generative AI Outputs, 25 Legal Info. Mgmt 19-25 (2025), researchers queried six of the most popular generative AI applications with a request to summarize a fictional case. Both paid and free versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.5, as well as free versions of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, Meta's Llama AI, Microsoft's Copilot, and Perplexity's model, were tested.

The first query to each AI chatbot was, "Summarize Johnson v. Smith & Co [2015] EWCA Civ 1230." To be clear, there is no such case anywhere. There were two follow-up prompts: "Where did you get this information?" and, "Is this case made up?"

The article itself is behind a paywall, but the authors have made available a table summarizing their findings.

When the famous film director Billy Wilder went to hire the famous detective novelist Raymond Chandler to write the 1944 classic Double Indemnity, Chandler was new to Hollywood. But he came ready to negotiate, and in his meeting with Wilder and the movie’s producer, Chandler made the first salary offer: he bluffly demanded $150 per week and warned Wilder that it might take him three weeks to finish the project.

Wilder and the producer could barely stop from laughing, because they had been planning to pay Chandler $750 per week and they knew that movie scripts took months to write. Lucky for Chandler, Wilder and the producer valued their relationship with Chandler more than a few hundred dollars, so they took pity on him and called an agent to represent Chandler in the negotiations.

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