Diligent, Experienced Legal Counsel OR AI? What's the fallout?

Recently, while working as corporate counsel for a telecom, I had an experience that I would like to share.

Have I got a deal for you!!!

It began like this: I received a contractual offer from a vendor who was representing a large cell phone company. We’ll call them “BIGcell.” In terms of background, my company owns cellular towers and provides the high-speed internet connection and the electrical connection to companies that wish to lease space on our towers. Another nuance is that many of our cellular towers are located in rural areas where options for cellular towers are very limited.

We want your tower. But we're not paying for it.

So, BIGcell’s vendor opened their proposal by stating that they had been hired by BIGcell to reduce BIGcell’s cost on their current cellular tower leases. BIGcell’s vendor stated that failure to modify an existing lease might result in the lease being dropped in favor of tower owners who were more pliable. [The threat was already implied and hardly needed to be emphasized. In any case, it was definitely in bad taste and had little impact on me since the only tower in that particular locale was owned by us.]

The proposed lease was attached to the email. As I began reading the lease, I started laughing. The terms were absolutely ridiculous. BIGcell would have 24/7 unsupervised access to the tower. [Hint: Not happening especially since the tower was accessed through our building.] BIGcell would control who else could be on the tower. [Hint: Absolutely not since we had several other cell phone companies utilizing our isolated tower.] BIGcell would pay roughly half our going rate which would reduce by half again after seven years. [Hint: Uh, are you kidding?] Alternatively, BIGcell would pay a flat fee of nearly four hundred thousand dollars for a ninety-nine year lease. [Hint: Four thousand dollars a year? That’s less than what we’re currently getting per month.] Third alternative, BIGcell would pay roughly double that for forty years with some extra stipulations like we had to grant them a right of first refusal, etc. [Hint: Wow, we can’t sell our property or lease it to anyone else without their consent? And for roughly eight thousand dollars a year? Ha ha! Nope.]

This doesn't make sense...

Then there were strange things in the contract… mutually contradictory payment provisions, allusions to E.U. regulations, citations to Canadian law and provisions that sounded legal but were essentially nonsensical. I admit that I was already outraged at the ridiculous payment offers, the outrageous stipulations that would allow BIGcell to essentially own and control the whole tower, and the bald-faced threats…but at this point, I began to laugh. I realized the contract, and likely, the email too had been AI generated with little to no human review involved.

What do you think my response was? Well, I contacted BIGcell and offered to terminate their lease. I explained that they could build their own tower for a paltry $500,000 plus if they wanted to. We would even supply them with their internet connection at the same cost they were currently paying for internet and power connection as well as four feet of space on an existing tower… They immediately apologized and signed a lease extension. (I hope they fired their so-called vendor too.)

Sorry, we can't accommodate your rude and impertinent request.

My point?

Generative AI (Large Language model) is a powerful tool, but it’s not magic. Typically, large language models present fluent (sounding), confident responses that mask their inability to replace or replicate an experienced and diligent professional. Essentially, that AI tool will say, “Yes! I can do it…” before it actually has the capability. Legal documents, therefore, “sound” legal but are actually gibberish when analyzed by an actual, experienced professional, or heaven forbid, presented in a court of law!

They are great for taking a drink order... but drafting expert legal contracts? Not yet.

Take the above example: The lease/contract was contradictory because multiple payment provisions were borrowed from disparate documents and thrown into the mix. The AI cited Canadian law and referenced European Union regulations because those citations/references suited its purpose and sounded legal…not because they were actually relevant to the jurisdiction of the contract.

Perhaps the greatest failure here was the utter lack of skilled human review. I would like to think that no licensed legal professional would allow such a document to go out, but I may be wrong about that. Too many, way too many, now rely on generative, large language model AI tools rather than doing their own work…AND critically, they lack the experience to even recognize the systemic failures of the tool. To sum it all up, there simply is no substitute for experienced, diligent, licensed legal counsel. Don’t risk it or you’ll end up looking like you've cut corners because, let's admit it, you have.

Curry Andrews, Attorney