Until six months ago, a significant part of my law practice involved consulting on electronically stored information (ESI), e-discovery, and serving as special master, to assist the court and parties in resolving e-discovery disputes. The cases on ESI began with the famous Zubulake opinions authored by Judge Shira Sheindlin (Ret.) of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. There were six opinions stemming from Zubulake beginning with the first, Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003). She was the Star Trek, the Space Ship Enterprise, forging the way with leading decisions on ESI, covering such issues as who pays the cost in producing ESI, predictive coding, litigation hold letters, sanctions, and the duty to preserve ESI for litigation. Many of the obligations of counsel are now contained in the Federal and state rules, and in particular, FRCP 37(e) dealing with sanctions.

ChatGPT

Although ESI is still important, generative artificial intelligence (AI), especially ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm. Not a day goes by where I don’t read an AI article. Artificial intelligence is not new, it has been around for years, albeit not in the advanced stage that has progressed into ChatGPT-4, an upgrade from ChatGPT-3.5, which is now available as a subscription service. ChatGPT is a form of AI and searches the entire internet to provide answers to just about any query. ChatGPT is limited to searches to 2021, however there are alternate programs that can search further. ChatGPT has passed the bar exam, can write student term papers, can conduct legal research and “draft” a brief, but be careful.

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and What Can It Do?