Reframing Compliance for a Polarized World

Corporate compliance relies on an intricate network of individuals and organizations to monitor and report wrongdoing. Compliance improves our collective well-being by curbing corporate misconduct and by facilitating the freer flow of information.Despite notable failures, compliance has thrived over the past three decades, becoming a well-respected element of corporate governance. Now, however, compliance faces a new challenge, as polarization has become the norm in American life. Political parties have grown more ideologically homogeneous, and politicians embrace more extreme variations of the positions they supported just a few years ago. Partisan thinking has moved beyond discrete political debates, spreading to the places where people live, socialize, and work. As it has done so, it has magnified hostility and tribalism.Networks create value when they diffuse information promptly and efficiently. Polarization damages compliance’s relational nodes and undermines the critical thinking and risk-assessment skills so crucial to its long-term success. Accordingly, if the compliance network is to survive, it must reorganize and reframe itself for a more polarized world. This Article problematizes polarization’s impact on compliance and then pivots to consider compliance’s best strategies for withstanding and responding to polarization’s formidable challenges. Some of compliance’s best options are already well known; others will seem surprising. All are deserving of our consideration

Generative Contracts

This Article examines how consumers can use generative artificial intelligence to write their own contracts. Popularized by “chatbots” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that uses statistical models trained on massive amounts of data to generate human-like content such as text, images, music, and more. Generative AI is already being integrated into the practice of law and the legal profession. In the context of contracting and transactional law, most generative AI tools are focused on reviewing and managing large volumes of business contracts. Thus far, little attention has been given to using generative AI to create entire contracts from scratch. This Article aims to fill this gap by exploring the use of “generative contracts”: contracts that are written entirely by a generative AI system based on prompts from the user. For example, a user could ask a generative AI model to, “Write me a contract to sell my used car.” The Article uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate drafts of a wide range of contracts from an employment agreement to a residential lease to a bill of sale. While relatively simple, the contracts written by GPT-4 are functional and enforceable. These results suggest that generative contracts present an opportunity to improve access to justice for consumers who are currently underserved by the legal system. To examine how consumers might use generative contracts in practice, the Article engages in a proof-of-concept case study of two hypothetical consumers who use GPT-4 to write and modify their own car sale contract. Drawing on this case study, the Article analyzes the implications of generative contracts for consumers, lawyers, and the practice of law. While generative AI holds great promise for consumers and access to justice, it threatens to disrupt the legal profession and poses numerous technological, privacy, and regulatory challenges. The Article maps the benefits and risks of generative contracts as the world approaches a future of automated contracting

Teaching Around Generative AI Plagiarism Risks

Much has been written and said about generative AI\u27s potential uses and misuses by lawyers and law students in the past year. This essay does not rehash the many ongoing discourses about whether, how, and to what extent generative AI (GenAI) can be used for and taught in legal writing courses. Rather, this essay is written under the assumption that, at least to some extent early on in the law school experience, some professors don\u27t want 1L legal writing students using GenAI to draft legal memoranda and briefs for them. As the American Bar Association\u27s Formal Ethics Opinion 512 warns, it is important to develop human lawyerly intelligence first before engaging in and being able to assess artificial intelligence. Despite the need for law students to develop that requisite lawyer intelligence required to meaningfully assess the value of any given AI-generated legal analysis, however, Lexis AI+ is now widely available to law students from their first month in school. That widespread access to GenAI may have its benefits, but not without also posing significant dangers of new AI-aided opportunities for plagiarism