Publisher: Wis Law Journal
The tone is pure pep rally. Insult the “fear mongers,” stroke the reader, drop a Kubrick reference, walk off smug. It contributes nothing useful. No policies, no checklists, no insurance or ethics analysis, no training plan, no vendor risk. If you are a lawyer looking for operational guidance, this article actively makes you dumber.
“Stop worrying and learn to love AI” is not a thesis. It’s a bumper sticker glued to a lazy op‑ed. The title rigs the game into a stupid binary. Either panic or join the cult. That move dodges the only adult position in tech adoption, which is risk management with sharp boundaries and receipts.
Herman waves around faxes and email like totems and calls it wisdom. That is survivorship bias dressed up as experience. Faxes did not invent authoritative nonsense at scale. Large language models do. They fabricate citations with a straight face, and when lawyers trust that patter, they get sanctions and client harm. “I lived through the fax panic” tells you nothing about generative systems that can produce confident lies all day long.
His fix is even worse. “Just supervise” is malpractice bait. Supervising a junior is not the same as supervising a stochastic text generator. Real supervision here means logs of prompts and outputs, model and version control, source provenance you can audit, strict citation verification before filing, vendor contracts that don’t exfiltrate client data, and explicit security review. You do not proofread hallucinations. You verify them like a bomb tech, every time, or you don’t deploy the tool.
He then claims AI will make legal writing more accurate and even find cases you missed. No. If you want recall and precision, you use curated research platforms, boolean queries, and primary sources. Generative models produce likely sounding text. They are not search engines. If you want to use them safely, you wrap them in retrieval, constrain outputs, and still treat every asserted fact as untrusted until checked. None of that appears in his piece, because he is selling comfort, not competence.
The tone is pure pep rally. Insult the “fear mongers,” stroke the reader, drop a Kubrick reference, walk off smug. It contributes nothing useful. No policies, no checklists, no insurance or ethics analysis, no training plan, no vendor risk. If you are a lawyer looking for operational guidance, this article actively makes you dumber.
And the publisher didn’t help. The Wisconsin Law Journal packages this like it’s 2010, with Comic Sans energy and an editor who looks allergic to complexity. Running this reads like a cheap play to curry favor with Big Tech while their ethics page still lists a 2017 symposium as “coming soon.” That is not stewardship. That is abdication. The byline pairing reads like nepotism theater. It has the vibe of a therapy dog in a blazer nodding along while the copy hums a Kubrick tune for courage.
Bottom line. The headline is clickbait, the argument is hollow, and the advice is dangerous. If you want reassurance, watch Dr. Strangelove. If you want to practice law, close this tab and go read something written by an adult who understands how these systems fail and how to contain them.
