Artificial intelligence can make the practice of law too easy. That’s a bad thing for clients and attorneys.
Yesterday a friend and colleague asked me if I could take on some consumer debt collection work. My first thought naturally was, “what are the rules for doing that?” I had heard of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. So I used artificial intelligence (Google) to find both the statute and the associated regulations.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulates debt collectors. Its Regulation F can be found at 12 CFR 1006. Regulation F has a lot of rules, which are simple but daunting in their 43 pages of text. It was tempting to ask Google Gemini for a “summary” of those rules, focused on what I would have to do / not do as a debt collector.
But I recognized (what many newer attorneys, or those have not coded software, might not): a “summary” always is asking for compression of information, and compression never is lossless.
So I read the 43 pages of text. And in there, in addition to requirements for text that must be in each debt collector’s initial written contact with a debtor, there also is a prohibition that turns out to be very helpful for a debt collection case that I currently am defending.
I do not think that the summary I contemplated would have surfaced that prohibition for me. It would have “saved” me about an hour of reading, and it would have made me feel knowledgeable. But it probably would not have given me the leverage that I now have for that other case.
A tool that cooks down knowledge to make it more digestible can sometimes detract from intellectual nourishment.
