‖‖ Conference Report

2023 CALL/ACBD Annual Conference

By Mi Yoon*

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries/l’association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit held its annual conference from May 28–31, 2023, in Hamilton, Ontario. The theme of the conference was “#IRL: Innovation, Research, and Leadership.”

ChatGPT Panel

On May 29, there was a panel session on ChatGPT and the legal field. The panelists were Colin Lachance, Mark Doble, and Brenda Lauritzen, with Shaunna Mireau moderating.

The speakers agreed that ChatGPT is good at summarizing things. It is a language model and thus understands language well. ChatGPT is also a good marketing tool, and one speaker advised that law librarians can use it to create promotional materials or send emails. Although AI is useful for objective tasks, another panelist stressed that we need to prevent AI from doing subjective tasks, such as advocacy, providing advice, negotiations, or summarizing case law.

AI can also make certain tasks more efficient; for example, it is used in e-discovery, and CoCounsel, Casetext’s new AI legal assistant, makes writing memos more efficient. However, at present, ChatGPT is not designed for the legal field. While legal professionals can use it to gain a basic understanding of an idea or legal concept, they should still consult authoritative texts for research.

AI can also improve access to justice by forcing legal professionals to rethink the billable hours model. The current billing model for law firms is low volume, high profit; however, AI can change this into a high volume, low profit model. As lawyers’ fees go down, more people will be able to afford them, therefore improving access to justice. Additionally, since ChatGPT and sites like CanLII are publicly available, costs can be lowered further. One speaker mentioned that while it will be a net benefit for lay people, it will be a bumpy road to get there.

On the negative side, the speakers predicted that ChatGPT could lead to more lawsuits, as it can help self-represented litigants write statements of claim. Currently, ChatGPT has some restrictions, so users cannot create claims; however, it is not foolproof, and users can work around these restrictions. The speakers also stressed that public legal education organizations need to do more to help the public understand AI’s influence on legal research.

Further, in addition to the potential copyright issues it can create, ChatGPT can also provide information that is either incorrect or does not exist. One panelist pointed out that ChatGPT is like an overconfident speaker who does not know what they are talking about.

Finally, the panel emphasized that legal librarians need to be champions of digital literacy. As one of the participants stated, as technology improves, information literacy goes down. Librarians need to teach legal professionals about the limitations of technology and stress the importance of verifying the facts and citations AI provides.

Lightning Talks

I also attended the Lightning Talks on May 30, during which seven presenters provided different insights into law librarianship:

• Mme. Michele LeBlanc explained jurisource.ca, a comprehensive, free website offering common law resources in French. It is the first of its kind in the world.

• Alexia Loumankis described a program at the University of Toronto’s Faulty of Law where she hires student research assistants for professors for shortterm projects. With this program, professors do not have to pay for a full-time RA if they do not need one, and students benefit from gaining valuable work experience.

• Dominique Garingan discussed using AI in advanced legal research. As generative AI can help summarize documents, it can be used to summarize cases, legal memos, and statements of analysis.

• Erica Smith and Bryony Livingston from the Ontario Legislative Assembly explained how their library developed a “gold standard” for writing reference answers. As a group, they agreed that, when composing a response, they clearly answer the client’s question(s) and provide the necessary context about the information included in the response.

• Nicolas Lobraico discussed his work researching reference transactions during his practicum at the Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP library. He provided an overview of the project, some of the challenges he faced, and the insights he gained.

• Sandra Craig and Amy Tang, also from the Ontario Legislative Assembly, described how they indexed large-scale digitization projects, specifically the Ontario government press releases from 1962 to 2005 and the Estimates Briefing Books from 1967 to 2019.

• Zena Applebaum spoke of the seven leadership skills that librarians need to be effective leaders: critical thinking, synthesis, communication skills, executive presence, curiosity, creativity, and business acumen/ savvy. She stated that successful law librarians need to develop these skills to keep librarianship valuable to legal professionals.