Hello friends.
There’s a new hot career in town, and it's called 'Prompt engineering'. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, I’ll catch you up. A new chatbot called ChatGPT has not only threatened lots of people’s jobs but it’s also created new job opportunities for non-coders in the LawTech community. That’s what we are going to focus on. The law firm Mishcon de Reya Is Hiring for a ‘prompt engineer’ aka a ‘prompt specialist’ and DLA Piper has added an AI Data Analytics practice. I have no doubt that many more law firms will follow suit. Hell in the firm I work for there are PowerPoint specialists who do nothing but make PowerPoints. Suffice it to say their jobs are getting taken away very soon by ChatGPT.
One of the most heartbreaking things is to turn away young lawyers who inbox me about getting involved in LawTech projects but who cannot code. There were very few positions for non-coders in the lawtech community unless you are litigating. That is until ChatGPT came around. So instead of coding the chatbots, prompt engineers draft the prose or the prompts that are given to the AI chatbots to produce a result. Their job is to by trial and error get the AI to successfully perform a certain task. That also involves some teaching on the prompt expert's part. I've attached examples of the prompts that I have tested out and the outputs I’ve received. Feel free to give me your feedback!
A prompt engineer’s job is to identify errors and explore the potential capabilities of chatbots so that coders can fix the errors and develop the chatbot. Essentially coders develop the chatbots and the prompt engineers test the product and try to perfect it. Believe it or not, chatbots make mistakes and need to be corrected, and law firms are always looking for ways to be more efficient. The argument in support of prompt engineers is that coders should stick to coding and the prompt engineers who hopefully will be lawyers can bridge the gap between what AI is capable of and what lawyers need. Prompt engineers by trial-and-error rigorously test the chatbots to get them to produce and reproduce the desired outcome. This will most likely happen by continuously tweaking the prompt. The prompt engineer’s duty includes improving human-machine interactions.
No doubt, every prompt engineer’s role will vary depending on the department or law firm they are working for, the underlying goal is to understand the capabilities of AI to understand why AI is making mistakes, and to help the AI see the errors in its reasoning process.
Prompt engineers are expected by law firms to squeeze all the benefits a firm can possibly get from AI. Now more than ever firms are desperate to lower costs and see a return on their lawtech investments. Gone are the days of money wasted on the theoretical application of technology to the law. We are living through exciting times guys! P.S. On UpWork there are ads for $40 an hour to work as a prompt engineer generating website content like blog posts and FAQs.
See you next week Thursday.
Take Care.
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