Enrico Schaefer argues lawyers should treat ChatGPT like an AI associate by building precise, step-by-step prompt sequences instead of vague requests. Break complex tasks into simple, non-contradictory pieces and separate concerns like tone and safety, the way a project manager breaks work into tasks and milestones.
Chapters
This is the new way in which law will be practiced. You want to think of 5.1 as your, for the first time, as your ability to kind of build agentic flow within the prompt sequence. Meaning in our world, you are going to be engineering workflow for an associate. That associate is ChatGPT, and you're going to be building a sequence building instructions that are very precise, and then turning that new AI associate or paralegal loose to go do the work or to work with you to get to a goal. So instruction following is better. And you want to avoid long prompts with hidden defaults or vague language that can lead to problems. You need to simplify your prompts. You have to treat your prompts and your system messages like specifications for the AI to abide by. This means you need to separate your request for tone, your request for safety, your workflow can't have 5 things in it. Instead of piling everything into a single prompt, you want to break things up into pieces and act sequentially like a project manager would break down projects by task categories, by tasks, by subtasks, by sequencing. This is the new way in which law will be practiced. So keep instructions simple, non-contradictory.