"All three bots hedged, reluctant to give opinions. "On the one thing ... on the other." That wishy-washy language is not what clients are paying for. They are paying for our opinions and our advice with available options about how to proceed. Clients want clear directions and advice; save the erudite for law review articles."
"In this admittedly unscientific test, one way to tell a bot from a human was vocabulary. If it sounds like it's "a panicked college freshman trying to sound profound," it's a bot. If the article, memo, or document starts out by telling the reader what it's about, it's a bot."
"You are not a bot, so don't write like one. Clients do not want to read (or pay for) pages and pages of legal gobbledygook that, in the end, only confuse the reader while the meter runs. Perhaps for law review articles and other scholarly compositions, more is more, but for the everyday lawyer who is just trying to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), twisting yourself into a legal literary pretzel does no one any good."
The Wall Street Journal compared three major AI language models (Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI) in legal writing tasks, revealing distinct strengths and weaknesses in each. Key differences between AI and human writing include vocabulary choices, structural patterns, and hedging language. AI tends to use evasive phrasing like "on one hand, on the other," avoiding clear opinions. Clients value direct advice and clear directions rather than equivocal language. As AI writing becomes increasingly sophisticated, distinguishing human from artificial writing will become more difficult. Lawyers should prioritize clarity and simplicity in legal writing, avoiding unnecessarily complex language that confuses readers. Effective legal communication requires getting to the point quickly rather than using verbose, convoluted phrasing.
#ai-language-models #legal-writing #human-vs-artificial-writing #client-communication #writing-clarity
Read at Above the Law
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