Having driven 2,000 miles and biked several hundred more, I’ve dragged myself back to the end of the world in Provincetown and am again wrestling with matters legal, including preparing for an upcoming Bar Foundation symposium on AI and the Law. It’s kind of funny that a guy who argued with his partners against buying a fax machine 45 years ago when they first became available, is again struggling with how and when to adopt new technology, but one of my panel members, Ryan McKeen, yesterday posited that it was unwise, if not malpractice, to ignore these tools.

I like to use the Rules of Professional Conduct as an evaluative matrix for lawyer conduct, whether dealing with ethics or best practices or standard of care. My go-to formula is what I call the six C’s, competence, communication, confidentiality, candor, conflicts and compensation. These probably cover most issues and are an easy mnemonic. I had an interesting discussion with some PhD students in Texas a few weeks ago on whether and how the RPC’s could be used as an evaluative tool to answer the question of what amount of regulatory oversight society might impose on AI technology, and the C’s seem to work well in fora other than law.