ChatGPT in Mass Torts

"I've been waiting for this moment, for all my life..." Maybe not since the days of underoos, but for many years. ChatGPT, and more broadly AI, will have a major impact on Mass Torts - it can solve inefficiency issues, claims accuracy and integrity, and client satisfaction. (Why care beyond the human experience? Less risk, better economics.)

I was one of those non-stop question kids. In school, I developed a rudimentary system to create customized motivation/incentive plans for employees essentially based on big data and analytics, terms I had no clue about. I simply stumbled upon these things conceptually. It was a sort of precursor to IBM Watson. Loving research, as a law student and young associate, I was drawn to data and emerging technologies to handle the vast body of information involved in complex personal injury cases, particularly mass torts. For the past decade or so, I’ve dabbled in legal ops and tech while litigating. Since discovering IBM Watson, I have been passionately optimistic about AI’s impact on both, particularly in mass torts. Enter my new BFF, ChatGPT.

I have explored ChatGPT for several months now. It is phenomenal. Now that the honeymoon phase is over, I realize it’s also far from perfect and my initial excitement has wanned slightly. As others smarter and more experienced have noted about the hype, it’s more about the possibilities than this specific application.

Nonetheless, here are five areas in which ChatGPT can impact mass torts on which I will expand over the coming weeks:

1. Case acquisition. From content development in marketing and advertising, to chatbots, to efficient evaluations and rankings, to finding entirely new litigations.
2. Client communications. Greater access, understanding, and compliance.
3. Document generation. Right now, we can generate letters, pleadings, etc. from fields in a database (i.e., case management systems/platforms). This is a whole ‘nother level.
4. Understanding and developing the medicine and science in cases. Think: general causation, differential diagnoses, lit bibliographies, and depo prep.
5. Data organization and analytics. The days of “case censuses” and hours working with Excel for bellwether selection and other purposes may be coming to an end, or at least made much easier. This is just one example, and just the beginning.