A law firm recently reached out to me to conduct a CLE on Mental Health Challenges in the Age of AI. It was an interesting request. I’ve spoken about AI issues on panels, as a keynote speaker, and in the classroom, and I wrote about it for Tennessee Journal of Business Law. I also conduct workshops and CLEs on mental health in the profession. But I’ve never been asked to combine the topics.
Before I discussed issues related to anxiety about job disruption and how cognitive overload affects the brain, I spent time talking about the various tools that are out there and how much our profession will transform in the very near future.
If you’re like many lawyers I know, you think that AI is more hype than substance. So I’ll share the information I shared with the law firm.
According to a 2024 Bloomberg survey on AI and the legal profession, 69% of Bloomberg survey respondents believe generative AI can be used ethically in legal practice. But they harbor “extreme” or “moderate” concerns about deep fakes (e.g., human impersonations, hallucinations and accuracy of AI-generated text, privacy, algorithmic bias, IP, and of course, job displacement.
Those are