*/
March 28, 2025 – Fei-Fei Li
We all have guilty secrets that we do not like revealing. In particular, there is one layer of self-secrecy we protect fiercely: when a secret might make us look something a little less than we like to imagine we are. I was rather surprised recently, therefore, when a colleague of mine with a stellar career at the commercial Bar told me that she often looked law up on Google AI rather than via the more traditional routes. I was deeply shocked. Not that she did it (I have been doing it myself for some time), but that she had confessed to it. I remembered, only a week before, impressing a friend on the phone with an excellent AI description of the law against perpetuities, to help him with a knotty inheritance issue. Fortunately, he never questioned why I was on ‘speaker’ with some TV blaring in the background. It was necessary, of course, to carry out the search. I did change the syntax and vocabulary somewhat, just in case he either had been or would be tempted to try the same thing himself.
The only encouraging thing to me is that AI voices still seem to speak in numbingly flat tones either with no, or the wrong, intonation. My voice-enabled document reader (very useful for appalling proof-readers) puts weird intonations on italicised words and has great difficulty speaking the formal title of a pleading if I use the letter ‘v’ between the parties. It goes temporarily into Serbo-Croat. Some advocates increasingly seem to have very flat tones too, although less so in crime. I have never seen the point of oral argument without some degree of vocal persuasion and passion, without, obviously, descending into the cod-theatrical. The power in oral advocacy does not just come from the words alone, but rather the compelling way in which they can be expressed. Ask Demosthenes.
It is rightly if depressingly (at least to advocates) said that advocacy only influences a small percentage of the final result in a case, but it can be the crucial bit. I learned the dramatic effect of speech at an early age. I once played a particularly silly trick at university when in a fellow undergraduate’s room, someone who later became one of my closest friends. At that time, we simply knew each other well in the way that students do over a period of relatively brief but intense acquaintance. We had both stayed up a little after term ended and both ended up in his room at about 2am finishing off some cheap plonk.
A very bad idea for a joke suddenly came into my head. I said, ‘We think we know each other, don’t we?’ He laughed. ‘You think that I’m a first year like you and that I live in the Midlands with my parents and siblings.’ He laughed again, perhaps with a hint of reserve. ‘It works every time,’ I went on, as the eeriness of the empty college seemed to press in on us. ‘But you see, I am not even at this wretched place.’ My smile disappeared and my voice hardened. ‘I’ve never passed an exam in my life. The real William Gutteridge – he called himself Bill actually – has been resting peacefully for several years now.’ I went on in similar vein for a few more sentences until suddenly he shouted really loudly, ‘Stop it!’ and I saw that he had his hand on the doorknob. I burst out laughing and harmony was restored. I noticed two things though: the power of the human voice and the fact that it took him much longer to be completely sure I was the real William than it had taken to persuade him that I was not. Of course, the atmospherics were just right and we had both watched a horror film with some other friends the week before, which I think was what put the silly idea into my head in the first place. We never referred to it again.
It is something that we as advocates should always bear in mind, because, as in this example, the same story in the same circumstances told in flat AI tones would have had him throwing something at me, not believing one word of it. It is understandable that lawyers often underestimate the power of oral argument. Spoken words changing minds? Maybe other people’s, but not mine. If we believe that, we fool ourselves. Then I noticed that my Alexa had been glowing green while the computer’s digital voice was reading this entry back to me. She’d been listening…
William Byfield is the pseudonym of a senior member of the Bar. Gutteridge Chambers, and the events that happen there, are entirely fictitious.
March 28, 2025 – Fei-Fei Li
We all have guilty secrets that we do not like revealing. In particular, there is one layer of self-secrecy we protect fiercely: when a secret might make us look something a little less than we like to imagine we are. I was rather surprised recently, therefore, when a colleague of mine with a stellar career at the commercial Bar told me that she often looked law up on Google AI rather than via the more traditional routes. I was deeply shocked. Not that she did it (I have been doing it myself for some time), but that she had confessed to it. I remembered, only a week before, impressing a friend on the phone with an excellent AI description of the law against perpetuities, to help him with a knotty inheritance issue. Fortunately, he never questioned why I was on ‘speaker’ with some TV blaring in the background. It was necessary, of course, to carry out the search. I did change the syntax and vocabulary somewhat, just in case he either had been or would be tempted to try the same thing himself.
The only encouraging thing to me is that AI voices still seem to speak in numbingly flat tones either with no, or the wrong, intonation. My voice-enabled document reader (very useful for appalling proof-readers) puts weird intonations on italicised words and has great difficulty speaking the formal title of a pleading if I use the letter ‘v’ between the parties. It goes temporarily into Serbo-Croat. Some advocates increasingly seem to have very flat tones too, although less so in crime. I have never seen the point of oral argument without some degree of vocal persuasion and passion, without, obviously, descending into the cod-theatrical. The power in oral advocacy does not just come from the words alone, but rather the compelling way in which they can be expressed. Ask Demosthenes.
It is rightly if depressingly (at least to advocates) said that advocacy only influences a small percentage of the final result in a case, but it can be the crucial bit. I learned the dramatic effect of speech at an early age. I once played a particularly silly trick at university when in a fellow undergraduate’s room, someone who later became one of my closest friends. At that time, we simply knew each other well in the way that students do over a period of relatively brief but intense acquaintance. We had both stayed up a little after term ended and both ended up in his room at about 2am finishing off some cheap plonk.
A very bad idea for a joke suddenly came into my head. I said, ‘We think we know each other, don’t we?’ He laughed. ‘You think that I’m a first year like you and that I live in the Midlands with my parents and siblings.’ He laughed again, perhaps with a hint of reserve. ‘It works every time,’ I went on, as the eeriness of the empty college seemed to press in on us. ‘But you see, I am not even at this wretched place.’ My smile disappeared and my voice hardened. ‘I’ve never passed an exam in my life. The real William Gutteridge – he called himself Bill actually – has been resting peacefully for several years now.’ I went on in similar vein for a few more sentences until suddenly he shouted really loudly, ‘Stop it!’ and I saw that he had his hand on the doorknob. I burst out laughing and harmony was restored. I noticed two things though: the power of the human voice and the fact that it took him much longer to be completely sure I was the real William than it had taken to persuade him that I was not. Of course, the atmospherics were just right and we had both watched a horror film with some other friends the week before, which I think was what put the silly idea into my head in the first place. We never referred to it again.
It is something that we as advocates should always bear in mind, because, as in this example, the same story in the same circumstances told in flat AI tones would have had him throwing something at me, not believing one word of it. It is understandable that lawyers often underestimate the power of oral argument. Spoken words changing minds? Maybe other people’s, but not mine. If we believe that, we fool ourselves. Then I noticed that my Alexa had been glowing green while the computer’s digital voice was reading this entry back to me. She’d been listening…
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