How should you spend your time on AI this month?

Issue 28 

Do you know any lawyers who feel like they have too much free time on their hands? I don’t.  

There are so many competing demands on a lawyer’s time. A lawyer like you is probably working to meet the demands of your clients and cases, your leadership responsibilities within your organization, marketing and networking, continuing education, pro bono, and mentoring. And you’re balancing all of those responsibilities and more with your personal life. 

And now you have a new attention-seeking demand on your finite time: figuring out what to do with AI.  

Most lawyers understandably don’t have a lot of free time to devote to AI. You want to get up to speed, or better yet, get ahead by using AI in your practice, but you’d also like to make it home for dinner at a reasonable hour. And when you are already so busy, the constant open firehose of AI news stories can quickly lead to overwhelm.  

You probably hear a lot of buzz about becoming proficient in legal prompt engineering and building custom GPTs for your practice. It would be easy to assume that this is where you should be spending the time you can carve out this month for AI. But for most lawyers, learning legal prompt engineering and building custom GPTs will not be the quickest path to a winning AI strategy. 

You Probably Don’t Need to Focus on Custom GPTs or Legal Prompt Engineering 

There is nothing wrong with investing your time in building custom GPTs if you have a passion or interest. And there are circumstances when it can make sense to learn legal prompt engineering. But these should not be the AI entry points or critical areas of AI focus for most lawyers.  

If you are interested in a customized AI solution for your practice, there’s a possibility that someone else has already built it. There are already hundreds of AI tools on the market that have been custom-built for the needs of lawyers. It’s worth investigating the available solutions before you build a custom AI solution so you don’t waste time reinventing the wheel. 

If you’re worried about learning legal prompt engineering, you should know that there are legal AI tools that don’t require you to become a prompt engineering expert. Some legal AI tools don’t even require prompting. An increasing number of legal AI tools are automating the prompting process, and the foundational models are continuing to improve in response quality.[i] In some cases legal prompt engineering skills may still come in handy, but before you worry about prompt engineering, there are several other steps you should take to confirm you are on the right path.  

What to Do Instead 

If you have five hours to devote to AI this month, how should you spend them?  

Five hours sounds like a lot of time to ask a busy lawyer to carve out. But it would be easy to spend five hours or more tinkering with custom GPTs or improving your legal prompt engineering skills. Maybe something useful would come out of those five hours…and maybe not.  

For most lawyers, whatever time you have to devote to AI this month would be better spent developing your AI competency and possibly starting to develop your AI strategy. If you allocate the time you have for AI this month to competency and strategy, you can rest assured that you’ll be able to tie your investment of time directly to reducing AI risks and seizing AI opportunities. 

Reduce AI Risks 

Lawyers should develop AI competency before they use AI for legal purposes to reduce their risk of costly and embarrassing AI-related mishaps. Even lawyers who aren’t currently using AI likely have AI risks to manage. For more on that topic, see Issue 19 of the newsletter.  For more on developing your AI competency, you can download this free resource. Developing your AI competency will help you identify ways to further reduce your AI risk. For ideas on how to get started with reducing AI risk, you can download this free resource. 

Seize AI Opportunities 

Once you’ve developed your AI competency, gather data from your organization to quantify the area(s) where a new technology solution would make the greatest impact before you commit to any particular type of solution. Through this work, you can uncover and better understand the inefficiencies present in your organization, while taking into account your organization’s culture in relation to technology adoption and use.  

Once you understand your organization’s areas for improvement, the next step is to identify the potential solutions. Keep in mind that due to the unique characteristics of your organization, the best solution for your organization may be radically different from the best solution for your biggest competitor. 

Once you have a list of potential solutions, the next steps are to perform risk assessments and evaluate which tool(s) will be the best fit for your organization.   

Is all of that achievable in five hours? Probably not. But it is work you can accomplish over time, while feeling confident that you are spending your time well in furtherance of reducing AI risk and seizing AI opportunities.  

If you would like a resource that can guide you through these steps faster, from developing your AI competency to implementing the AI tool that best matches what your organization needs, you’ll want access to A Lawyer’s Practical Guide to AI. Learn more about how the guide can help you here. 

Thanks for being here. 

Jennifer Ballard
Good Journey Consulting  

[i] Schwarcz, Daniel and Manning, Sam and Barry, Patrick James and Cleveland, David R. and Prescott, J.J. and Rich, Beverly, AI-Powered Lawyering: AI Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and the Future of Legal Practice (March 02, 2025). Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 25-16 at 20, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5162111 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5162111.