And if you think it’s just president’s pages and remarks at various events, think again, said Sadina Montani, president of the D.C. Bar: Get ready for your email inbox to fill up with messages from members, law students, and others looking for a moment of connection with you. You’ll intend to reply to each one—and keep up with the bar’s social media, podcasts, and other communications; all your other bar work; your family and friends; and your practice. “You’re going to need more hours in a day than currently exist,” Montani said, “and you still should be sleeping.” Fortunately, help is available. AI is not a replacement for lawyers or for staff at bars or at law firms, Montani believes; instead, it’s your “partner in efficiency” and another tool you can add to the ones you already use every day.
Not an instant fix
But that doesn’t mean you can open up ChatGPT, feed it a hastily written prompt, and expect it to crank out your next column, perfect and ready to go. Getting the best results from AI takes careful thought, training and practice.
“It’s like having an army of personal assistants to whom you need to give very specific instructions,” Montani said, noting that the old saying “garbage in, garbage out” holds true here: Good prompts and thorough information help keep the AI chatbot from hallucinating false details and will give you a better overall product.
Montani describes the D.C. Bar’s approach to AI as “very forward-looking, but with guardrails.” Bar staff are encouraged to experiment with AI but must choose from an approved set of tools: Claude.ai, ChatGPT, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. They must also receive training, prioritize data safety and confidentiality first, and be purposeful and transparent about their AI use.
How does Montani train AI to know her voice, her style, and the topics she typically writes or speaks about? By feeding it previous pieces she’s written, she said. She then backs this up with precise instructions about the word count or speaking time, the themes she wants to touch on, and what tone she wants the new piece to have.
A few ways AI can help you
- Meeting prep & follow up: Before attending an event, Montani provides whichever AI tool she’s using with the meeting materials and has it create a summary of who will be there and what they’ll be speaking about. Afterward, she uses it to draft follow-up emails to speakers or attendees she wants to connect with further.
- Email management: For the many emails in which members and others ask to speak with her, Montani gives instructions for the chatbot to respond, to make it sound personal rather than canned, to indicate that she would like to set up a Zoom meeting within a few weeks, and to ask them to propose a time.
- Speechwriting & talking points: AI is especially good at writing speeches and presentations. It can read your PowerPoint and any other files you upload, and write a script to fit the time you specify, in the tone you indicate, such as “conversational first-person voice.” Montani has also used AI to help draft talking points before board meetings where there needs to be a challenging discussion.
Start small, and practice
Returning to the idea of AI as a personal assistant, Montani noted that “If you are not a good manager of people, you are not going to be a good manager of AI.”
When she used AI to help her draft her first president’s page for the D.C. Bar, Montani recalled, she ended up having to rewrite the whole thing. But even that was a help, she said: “It’s so much easier to edit than to put words on a blank page.”
By comparison, when she had it draft a president’s page shortly before speaking at BLI, after months of working with it on columns and other pieces, she was “gobsmacked” by what it put out. About 90 percent of the final version of the column was what AI wrote, she said, adding that you’ll always want to do some refining, but that 45 minutes spent editing is much better than six hours spent writing, or struggling to write.
Whether they realized it yet or not, Montani said, all incoming presidents struggle with managing their time and responsibilities. Her parting advice for anyone new to AI and interested in using it to help make the most of their term was to start small: “Think of one thing you need to do, and that AI can make easier.”
