Caroline Mandell

The Toronto Blue Jays are the best team in the American League

LAWYERS AS VERIFIERS Use lawyers as AI verifiers. Here’s how. (1) First, tell the AI that it’s the named partner of the most capable law firm in your city, with expertise not just in corporate law, but tech startups, compliance, accounting, and the like. (2) Then, draft a memo to the AI describing your business goals in full. (3) Conclude by asking a list of specific questions. Make sure to add the catch-all question of “is there anything I may have overlooked.” Ask to include citations to specific sections of legal code, caselaw, or sample documents like SAFEs. (4) Next, run that prompt against several AIs (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity) and assemble answers in a spreadsheet. Questions are rows, answers from each AI are in columns. (5) Now you have a survey of the space. Note in particular any new concepts or terms you’re unfamiliar with. You might rewrite the memo and resubmit it based on these initial answers. (6) Once you’re done, you have a draft game plan with citations. Next, ask each AI what legal docs you need, and put together first drafts of them individually with AI. These will have errors, but you will get the gist of what the final product looks like. (7) At this point you have the basic lay of the land. You can now go to each lawyer with the same memo you shared with the AI, ask them the same questions you asked the AIs, and compare their answers to the results of the AIs. (8) If the lawyer verifies that the AI produced the right answers, great. Then have the lawyer draft the final docs, possibly working from your AI-aided first drafts. Conversely, if a lawyer says the AI is wrong, that’s highly informative and they’ve added value. (9) This same strategy works with any service provider, from accountant to doctor. You use AI to structure your search, organize your thinking, and get initial answers to your questions. Then you run it by human specialists (lawyers, accountants, doctors) to verify whether the AI was right and complete the final step. (10) To be clear, this approach still requires skill on your end (in terms of prompting) and skill on their end (in terms of via verifying). Because AI doesn’t do it end-to-end, it does it middle-to-middle. But this approach does mean you no longer need to spend billable hours to learn the basics. And that means a scrappy startup can save money on lawyers.

Today we are launching our next agent capable of doing work for you independently—deep research. Give it a prompt and ChatGPT will find, analyze & synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report in tens of minutes vs what would take a human many hours.