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By far the biggest and most dangerous Illinois legal trend of the last two years has been how people are trying to find legal information.
While most people are still calling lawyers, there are still some that rely on friends, neighbors, relatives etc. to give them legal advice. In other words, if you are hit by a car in Chicago or going through a divorce, what happened to someone you know has no bearing on what will happen in your case. Every case is different. So getting legal advice from these non-lawyes who have a small sample size of experience is a bad idea. That is especially true if you rely on them in making a decision on your case.
This problem has existed forever and is one reason we started our website back in 2001. We wanted to make free Illinois legal advice accessible and reliable. We do that by getting you with attorneys that we as lawyers would recommend to our friends and family members.
Of late there is a twist on how people are getting bad legal advice. The answer is ChatGPT. I get why people want to use it. It is in the news a lot and it spits out information back at your pretty quickly. The way the information is presented is almost as if it was a person who was answering your question.
The problem is that it’s not a person at ChatGPT or any other AI feature giving this advice. It is a collection of things that they find on the internet. And while many things on the internet are correct, of course many are not. As a result, we continually get called by people who told us what legal advice AI gave them and quite often it is wrong.
This is not a surprise. One study showed that ChatGPT is wrong over 52% of the time. There have been numerous examples of it making up cases that do not exist. There have even been lawyers who have been fooled by this and sanctioned by courts.
We have also seen situations where it is giving legal advice that might be correct in one state, but isn’t in the state of Illinois. In one instance, had the person who called us believed what the AI told them, they would have missed the statute of limitations for filing their lawsuit.
When you are getting legal advice, you need it to be 100% accurate. A big problem with these tools is that they will never say, “I’m not sure or I don’t know.” That is something a good lawyer does all of the time. They then take the time to dive into your situation. Or if you come to us, we will tell you who the leading lawyers are for whatever legal issue you are dealing with.
The other problem with ChatGPT is that it lacks nuance and critical thinking skills. Two to three times a day I will get a call from someone who thinks they have one legal issue, but really they have another. For example, somebody with back pain calls and their concern is that if they go out on FMLA they won’t have health insurance to pay for their needed treatment. But we dive into the specifics of their case and realize the back pain is caused in part by their job. As a result we advise them to pursue a workers’ compensation claim which will cover 100% of their medical bills and unlike FMLA, pay them for their time off of work.
Perhaps some day these tools will be as competent as getting advice from an experienced, trained professional, but that time has not yet come. So while I get why people might do this, it really is just a search engine right now and not something you can rely on to give accurate advice or a real analysis of your unique situation.
