6Your Turn

Questions. Comments. Ideas.

The talk works best as a conversation. Interrupt me, push back, and tell me what you’re seeing. If something I said wouldn’t hold up in your courtroom, I want to hear it.

Request for relief

Object loudly.

Three things I’d love to hear from the room, in the session or afterward.

1

How does your office actually handle discovery, charging, and trial prep?

The use cases in Part 3 were built on one office’s workflow. Yours is probably different.

2

Ideas, thoughts, and suggestions for ways to use AI.

The best prompts I’ve seen came from lawyers describing a task they hate, not from engineers.

3

What you’ve tried, good or bad.

Especially the bad. A tool that fooled a careful lawyer is more useful to the room than one that worked.

If you remember six things

The whole talk, one line per part.

  1. 1
    The question isn’t whether the defense can use AI. It’s whether you’ll recognize it when they do.

    Read their authority the way you’d read a pro se motion: pull every cite. Part 1

  2. 2
    The model is the engine. Everything useful comes through a door, and every door in is also a door out.

    Prompts, search, connectors, skills, projects, agents. Part 2

  3. 3
    A skill turns one lawyer’s best process into something the whole office can reuse.

    And a good one never states elements from memory. Part 3

  4. 4
    Copilot can’t install a skill, but it can follow one. Keep the rules, the step order, and the output table.

    And use it to check your own citations before someone else does. Part 4

  5. 5
    Verify it with your own eyes. Enterprise accounts only. Keep the reps.

    Two EDNC cases, five habits, one rule. Part 5

  6. 6
    We figure this out together.

    There are no experts. Tell me what you’re seeing.

Resources and sources

Where to go next.

Ethics

The two controlling opinions

  • N.C. State Bar, 2024 Formal Ethics Opinion 1, “Use of Artificial Intelligence in a Law Practice” (Nov. 1, 2024). Six inquiries with answers: competence, vendor diligence, in-house tools, signing pleadings, client disclosure, billing.
  • ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 29, 2024). Maps the existing Model Rules onto generative AI; creates no new obligations.
  • Neither body wrote an AI-specific rule. Rules 1.1, 1.6(c), 3.1, 3.3, 5.3 and N.C. R. Civ. P. 11 stayed where they were.
The EDNC matters

Read the orders yourself

  • Fivehouse v. U.S. Dep’t of Defense, No. 2:25-cv-41 (E.D.N.C. Apr. 2026) (order of public reprimand), via Courthouse News.
  • Thomas v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, No. 5:25-cv-242 (E.D.N.C.), Doc. 25, Federal Defendants’ Response to Court Order (filed July 15, 2026).
  • Coverage: ABA Journal (Mar. 11, 2026); Bloomberg Law; Law360; Courthouse News.
Tools and skills

Open-source starting points

Behind the demo

The thesis

  • Cuffney, Ethically Implementing Generative AI in Prosecution (Northwestern University, 2025). Six career prosecutors evaluated AI summaries across ten redacted public-records cases; their criticisms became the rules in the prosecutor-analysis skill.
  • Statute and instruction libraries built from ncleg.gov and the NC School of Government’s pattern jury instructions.
Thank you

Let’s stay in touch.

Robert Cuffney · Legal Knowledge Engineer · Former Mecklenburg County ADA

Emailrwcuffney@gmail.com
LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/robertcuffney