Understanding AI
for Lawyers
A practical guide explaining what AI actually does, why it matters for legal work, and how to use it responsibly. Written for practitioners, not engineers.
What you'll learn
Everything a Lawyer Needs to Know About AI
How LLMs Actually Work
What large language models do, why they hallucinate, and why that matters for your practice.
Confidentiality & Tool Choice
Which AI tools are safe for client data and which aren't — with Swiss law specifics.
Professional Duties
Verification and explainability obligations when using AI-generated legal work.
AI Legal Research
How retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) transforms legal research — and its limits.
Prompting for Lawyers
Concrete examples of weak, better, and strong prompts for legal tasks.
Reasoning Models
When to use quick chat vs. reasoning mode — and why it matters for complex questions.
Table of contents
65 Pages of Practical Guidance
Part I
Context & Foundational Technology
- •AI As The Latest Disruptive Technology
- •Large Language Models: The Foundation Of Legal AI
- •Training Data, Model Snapshots, And Versions
Part II
Core Risks & Professional Duties
- •Structural Risks: Hallucinations, Non-determinism, And The Black Box
- •Professional Duties: Verification And Explainability
- •Confidentiality And Tool Choice
- •Tool Types And Confidentiality Risk
- •Emerging Risk: Multimodal AI And Synthetic Evidence
Part III
Strategic Implementation
- •Selecting AI Models: Open-Source Vs. Proprietary
- •Where To Run Your AI: Cloud, Infrastructure, And Operational Independence
- •Different Models And Their Personalities
Part IV
Practical Application & Advanced Topics
- •Prompting As A New Legal Skill
- •AI In Legal Research
- •RAG: Working With Your Own Documents
- •Orchestration And AI Agents
- •Reasoning Models And Thinking Time
About this guide
Born from a live session with 650+ lawyers
This guide grew out of a presentation delivered to around 650 lawyers and notaries at the Jeunes Barreau et Notariat Valaisans Association in Switzerland. The objective was to demystify AI and connect it concretely to the realities of legal practice.
It is written for practitioners without a technical background, using concrete examples, historical analogies, and real-world case studies — including the Mata v. Avianca sanctions case — to make abstract concepts immediately actionable.
650+
Lawyers & notaries
65
Pages of guidance
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