The Art of AI Prompting in Dispute Resolution Practice

This blog post originally appeared in Indisputably.

The quality of AI outputs depends on users’ skill in inputting good prompts.

That’s the premise of my new article:  The Art of AI Prompting in Law and Dispute Resolution Practice.

It provides practical guidance about how to use AI tools responsibly, ethically, and effectively.  It describes core skills including:

• Choosing the right AI tool;
• Writing good prompts;
• Using follow-up questions;
• Avoiding AI’s problems; and
• Applying professional judgment when using results.

It’s important to choose the right AI tool.  A brilliant prompt to the wrong tool is a bad prompt.  The article includes a list of specialized legal AI tools for legal and dispute resolution practice.

You shouldn’t just take the first response – it’s important to ask follow-up questions.  This article offers a long list of suggested follow-up prompts.

It also provides examples of prompts across the life of a case – before, during, and after mediation.

It cites ABA Ethics Opinion 512, which describes lawyers’ ethical duty of technological competence under the ABA Model Rules.

If you would like to see some hands-on demonstrations, I also posted two short SSRN articles with companion 30-minute videos:

• How Mediators and Lawyers Can Use AI: A Practical Video Guide describes a video with real-time demonstrations of how mediators and lawyers can use AI to prepare for sessions, help clients, and improve their own decision-making.
  
• A Video Guide for Teaching Law Students to Use AI Wisely is a resource for faculty and students, showing how AI can advance legal education without undermining core lawyering skills. It includes sample uses for negotiation prep, writing support, and simulation design.

AI won’t do your work for you.  But it can help you do it better – and probably faster.

Take a look.

John Lande

John Lande is the Isidor Loeb Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law. He previously directed its LLM Program in Dispute Resolution. He earned his J.D. from Hastings College of Law and Ph.D in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began practicing law and mediation in… MORE