Every American deserves access to excellent lawyering.
The cost of elite legal representation has collapsed, and Showalter PLLC is on a mission to ensure that Americans benefit. AI is the most powerful cost-reducing technology the legal profession has ever seen, and using it responsibly can make excellent representation available to people and causes that could never afford traditional elite-firm rates. Michael Showalter has petitioned the profession’s regulators and the courts to help make that a reality.
Bar and court submissions
ABA
Petition to the American Bar Association
A petition asking the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility to issue a formal opinion encouraging lawyers to use AI responsibly to cut legal expense and expand access to justice. The petition argues that the cost of excellent lawyering has collapsed, with briefs delivered at a fraction of elite-firm pricing and no drop-off in quality, and that the profession should resist the double standard that treats an error as more serious because a machine produced it.
The same request made to the District of Columbia Bar’s Legal Ethics Committee: that it encourage lawyers to use AI responsibly to reduce legal expense and expand access to justice, and that it decline to hold an AI-assisted error to a stricter standard than the identical error from a human hand.
A comment endorsing Virginia’s proposed Legal Ethics Opinion 1902, which addresses a lawyer’s duty on finding serious errors, including hallucinated citations, in an opponent’s filing, and which recognizes that whether AI was used is largely irrelevant to that duty. The comment makes one recommendation: that the final opinion say explicitly what its framework implies, that AI-related errors are not subject to a heightened ethical standard.
Comment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
A comment opposing proposed Rule 46.5(B)(4), which would require a lawyer who used AI to certify that a human reviewed the citations. The comment argues that AI is the cure for citation errors rather than their cause, that the rule misidentifies sloppiness as an AI problem and duplicates a duty the court already enforces, and that it taxes access to justice by compelling a person to repeat by eye work a tool performs at least as accurately. The recommendation is to certify that the citations are accurate rather than that a human checked them.
The biggest companies and richest individuals probably won’t notice the cost of a paralegal charging a few hundred dollars per hour. Ordinary middle-class Americans do.
AI is the most powerful cost-reducing technology the legal profession has ever seen. Responsible AI use can make excellent representation available to people and causes that could never afford traditional elite-firm rates.
Last week, in a post viewed over 250k times, Professor Orin Kerr wrote about a "mostly AI-written law review article" an anonymous lawyer is publishing with a Top 50 law school. Law professors were not happy. I'm the lawyer.
A law professor's experiment suggests that Claude plus a connector (such as DingDuff or Midpage) now outperforms Westlaw's AI at legal research. A human using Westlaw without AI like it's 2022 doesn't stand a chance.
Showalter PLLC, believe it or not, uses stunningly powerful technology that my friends at the world's richest law firms cannot access. It's a good time to be the little guy.
SCANDAL: A Pangram scan finds that controversial law review article Mere Machines is only "99 percent" human-drafted and "AI-generated content appears in scattered patches." Can it really be said that this piece is human authored?
D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Glickman with a point everyone has been thinking but no one has been willing to say out loud: "Fulfilling the duty to guard against AI-hallucinated (or otherwise invalid) citations can be a group effort…"
Today I'm releasing an initial version of Showalter's Law Dictionary, a free law dictionary built systematically from primary-source definitions—the first of its kind, to my knowledge.
The ad hominem fallacy is when a speaker avoids an argument's substance by attacking its human source; I use the term "ad machinam fallacy" for the same mistake when the source is a machine.
