RIPS Law Librarian – Lawyers Fail to Serve the Public and Themselves: ChatGPT to the Rescue to Placate the Jealous Mistress? by Sarah Gotschall: “As law librarians and legal research professors, we have witnessed firsthand how law students struggle with their time and labor-intensive legal research and writing assignments. And of course, the many of us who are lawyers ourselves know the struggle is real and is nothing new. It is an often repeated maxim that the “Law is a jealous mistress” which “requires long and constant courtship. It is not to be won by trifling favors, but by a lavish homage.” Though coined by Justice Joseph Story in 1829, the words remain true today. The law is a perennial and needy attention hog, always wanting more and more from its practitioners. Though legal technology has made many aspects of legal practice easier – word processing, online researching, electronic filing – the real work of lawyers – reading, thinking, analyzing, and writing – is just as time and energy consuming as ever. Perhaps it is more arduous now due to the nature of our common law system. With an ever-increasing number of published opinions, it becomes more time-consuming to locate and analyze cases to determine the most relevant legal principles for a specific situation. This can prove challenging for legal practitioners, who attempt to stay abreast of the latest case law and developments in their areas of expertise…This seems like an industry ripe for disruption! Can AI language generators like ChatGPT come to the rescue, making legal services more affordable to the public and law practice more enjoyable/less stressful for lawyers? It could be said that, for hundreds of years now, lawyers have abused their monopoly on the provision of legal services by failing to serve the majority of the public, despite sometimes sacrificing their own health and sanity along the way. Is it time to step aside and let the robots try!?”