Don't Freak Out About The Bar Exam Or AI ... Yet

With the bar exam fast approaching, it's time for my semi-annual admonishment. After it's over or even before it's completely over, do not, I repeat, do not discuss your answers with anyone, and I mean anyone, study partners especially. When you do that, it's crazy-making. You fret, worry, obsess about the answers of others, whether they saw issues you didn't or the reverse. You don't know whether their answers are right and yours aren't. It's a huge wallow in self-doubt. You don't need that.

Just walk away from any conversation, be it about the MBE, performance test, essays, whatever. If you must get up and leave, then do so politely, but do not torture yourself about the "shoulda, woulda, coulda" aspect of taking the bar exam. Trust me on this. I didn't follow my own advice. I spent some time freaking out. Don't make my mistake. Yes, you can thank me later.

As you study furiously for the bar exam, some people question whether they have made the right career decision by first going to law school and now sitting for a grueling exam that takes no prisoners. And if studying for the bar exam is not stressful enough, one bar review provider has had problems with its website. However, the old-style written materials are still available.

In dinosaur days, we didn't have the internet (!) and so in studying for the bar exam, we had to attend bar review courses in person. (What a concept.) The written materials were precisely that, written. The bar review course I took all those years ago (now long gone) had excellent materials and a plethora of practice exams. No laptops, so we typed our practice essay answers on typewriters (remember them, dinosaurs?) or wrote them out by hand, mailed them (remember mail?), and waited for their return. Antiquated, yes, but it worked. I remember a con law practice exam that I wrote shortly before the bar exam and almost the precise question was on the exam. Yippee! That was an easy one to write.

This is not a bar exam question, but an existential one: whether the decision to go to law school was indeed the right decision. Fine time to raise that question right before the bar exam. It's a brave new world that newbie lawyers will enter, facing cutbacks in lawyer staffing due to slowdowns in various practice areas, the rise of AI and ChatGPT, not to mention massive student debt loads. Is practicing law something that you want to do? For some people, going to law school after college has been a good way to delay making decisions about what you want to do with your life and how to do it. Long ago, postponing the inevitability of adult life seemed like a good idea at the time, but then there wasn't any AI, except for HAL in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey."

However, as Jonathan Wolf correctly points out, there are some things that AI will never be able to do, at least not in my lifetime. AI is exactly that, artificial (the term says so) intelligence, and so it won't have the ability (again, at least in my lifetime) to make those connections that are an essential part of the attorney-client relationship. Sometimes, it's just lending an ear, sometimes it's comforting someone in distress, sometimes it's advocating for someone who doesn't have a voice, who doesn't know which way to turn, sometimes it's wresting the shovel from a client's hand to prevent further digging of a metaphorical grave.

Yes, AI can draft documents; yes, it can draft pleadings; yes, it can research the law (maybe not, on second thought, given what's happened recently to lawyers who relied to their detriment on AI; I doubt AI has any allowance to pay sanctions nor would it ever have to pony up). But the human, emotional component of practice is something that I don't think it can ever replace. Until AI has emotional intelligence, at least part of what we do remains intact.

What is existentially scary about AI? As the head of Google said in a recent interview, those most likely to be negatively impacted (a polite way of saying "sacked") are the knowledge workers. There was no specific mention of lawyers in the group that will be so impacted (writers, software engineers, accountants, architects) but it's no stretch to include lawyers in that group. AI can already pass a bar exam, but there's no need for it to pass any ethics exam, since ChatGPT doesn't have any ethical obligations. It is still all on us.

Everyone seems to say that AI is coming for the lawyers, at least one fund manager thinks so. How big a risk is AI for lawyers? Some predict that as much as three-quarters of legal work can be done more quickly by AI; notice "quickly" as opposed to "correctly."

But it's premature to revise the lyrics to the old Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson song, "Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" by replacing the word "cowboys" with "lawyers."

It's not much ado about nothing, as AI is something, but hysteria doesn't help. It's all about how to use technology, not let it destroy us.

[photo2]Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She's had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact -- it's not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.