You just read a story: a lawyer used ChatGPT to find case law, but the AI gave him cases that didn’t exist. The judge laughed. The lawyer looked like a fool. It went viral. Legitimate question: should my lawyer actually be using AI?<\/p>\n
AI in law isn’t a myth. It can genuinely help. But not like Google. A good legal AI can analyze hundreds of rulings in minutes. It can help you structure an argument. It can check if you’re missing an important precedent.<\/p>\n
But\u2014and it’s a big “but”\u2014you can’t trust it blindly. It’s like a very smart intern who sometimes hallucinates. You have to verify. You have to understand. Otherwise, you’re in professional trouble.<\/p>\n
Here, we have civil law, not common law like the rest of Canada. Our law comes from the Quebec Civil Code, not from common law. General AIs (ChatGPT, Gemini) are trained mostly on Anglo-American law. They don’t know Quebec law well.<\/p>\n
That’s a problem. If you ask ChatGPT a question about family law in Quebec, it’ll make things up or give you Ontario law by accident.<\/p>\n
The solution? Specialized AIs, trained on our rulings, our laws, our legal culture. That doesn’t really exist yet. And it’s expensive. So for now, a lawyer using AI for Quebec law needs to be extremely careful.<\/p>\n
The Barreau du Qu\u00e9bec needs to give clear guidelines. Is it allowed to use ChatGPT for legal research? Yes, under certain conditions. Which ones? You must verify all the rulings the AI gives you. You can’t cite them without confirmation. You need to keep a record of how you used the AI (in case you get sued).<\/p>\n
And we need to invest in a Quebec legal AI infrastructure. Not wait for the Americans to build something. Our legal data, our case law, should feed a public Quebec AI.<\/p>\n
If you hire a lawyer, you can ask: “Do you use AI? If so, how do you verify the information?” That’s a good question to ask. A good lawyer will explain their process.<\/p>\n
The truth? AI is going to transform the law. Repetitive tasks (organizing documents, doing a first draft of research) will be accelerated. But for judgment, argumentation, strategy? You still need a real brain. AI can augment the lawyer, not replace them.<\/p>\n
That’s the transition we need to manage now, in Quebec. And it requires collaboration between lawyers, the Bar, and AI developers. To better understand how AI affects sectors like law, check out what we’re exploring at Laeka Research<\/a><\/strong>. And for simple explanations on AI and its legal implications, visit Sherpa<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You just read a story: a lawyer used ChatGPT to find case law, but the AI gave him cases that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-in-quebec"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}