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As new lawyers, we were taught in law school how to use technology to our advantage. However, this means there are also ways that the use of technology in the legal profession can go awry. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most prominent example of a technology that has many helpful uses, and some pitfalls.

As new lawyers, we were taught in law school how to use technology to our advantage. However, this means there are also ways that the use of technology in the legal profession can go awry. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most prominent example of a technology that has many helpful uses, and some pitfalls.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence refers to computer systems that can perform complex tasks usually done by humans, such as reasoning, decision-making, creating, drafting, etc. Because of AI, attorneys can produce better legal work in fewer hours, benefiting clients greatly. Some lawyers hesitate to incorporate AI into their practice, partly because AI raises ethical questions and risks, such as compromising confidential client data, or waiving attorney-client and attorney work product privileges.

Recently, lawyers and law firms have gotten sanctioned for failing to check case citations generated by AI. In June 2023, two New York attorneys filed a brief written by ChatGPT, which included citations to six non-existent cases and erroneous quotes. It is a cautionary tale that led to sanctions and public scrutiny.

In February of 2025, a federal court fined an attorney for “hallucinated” AI citations. When AI generates plausible but false text, this is a ‘hallucination.’ The court found that lawyers have an ethical duty to check the cites used in their legal filings and “read the case to ensure the excerpt is existing law to support their propositions and arguments.” Judge Kelly H. Rankin, the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming. Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc., D. Wyo., No. 2:23-cv-118-KHR

On July 29, 2024, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics & Professional Responsibility issued Formal Opinion 512, Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools. In Formal Opinion 512, the ABA stated, 

“To ensure clients are protected, lawyers using generative artificial intelligence tools must fully consider their applicable ethical obligations, including their duties to provide competent legal representation, to protect client information, to communicate with clients, to supervise their employees and agents, to advance only meritorious claims and contentions, to ensure candor toward the tribunal, and to charge reasonable fees.” 

I have compiled a list of key do’s and don’ts below to help guide you through best practices.

Do:

1. Start Using AI with Simple Tasks: To familiarize yourself with AI tools before applying them to more complex legal work, begin with low-stakes tasks such as document summarization or text editing.

2. Leverage AI for Efficiency: Use AI to legal research, contract review, and predictive analysis tasks.

3. Critically Review Answers: Always validate AI-generated content to align with legal standards and client interests. AI tools are not foolproof and require human oversight to avoid errors or omissions.

4. Maintain Ethical Standards: Adhere to ethical obligations such as client confidentiality, informed consent, and competence when using AI tools.

5. Invest in Training: Gain a basic understanding of how AI works and its limitations.

6. Experiment with Different Tools: Explore various AI platforms, such as Casetext’s CoCounsel, Westlaw Edge, or MyCase IQ, to find the tools best suited to your practice needs.

7. Treat AI as a Tool, not a Decision-Maker: Use AI to assist your thinking, never to replace it.

8. Stay Updated on AI Ethics and Bar Guidance: Regularly check with the State Bar of Michigan and the ABA for updates, opinions, and rules involving AI and legal practice.

Don’t:

1. Rely on AI for Legal Research Without Independent Verification: Always verify the facts and conclusions yourself. AI tools can assist, but the final responsibility lies with you.

2. Submit AI-Generated Content Without Review: As discussed above, copying and pasting from AI without proofreading or fact-checking can lead to ethical violations and sanctions.

3. Input Confidential Client Data: Treat AI like any third-party service provider. Avoid inputting sensitive client data to adhere to ethical standards such as client confidentiality and informed consent.

4. Misunderstanding AI’s Limitations: New lawyers might assume AI can handle complex legal reasoning or strategic decision-making. However, AI tools are best suited for repetitive tasks like document review or research, and cannot replace nuanced legal judgment or human expertise.

5. Assume AI is Always Neutral or Unbiased: AI tools can reflect biases in their training data.

6. Ignore It: Lawyers and firms that resist AI will fall behind.

7. Stop Learning: The best lawyers will be the ones who keep adapting and staying informed.

AI is a powerful tool for legal professionals, but it does not replace the need for legal expertise and judgment. While it can streamline processes and enhance efficiency, lawyers must remain vigilant about their ethical duties and responsibilities.

Natalie Lennon is a health law attorney with a background in regulatory compliance, healthcare transactions, and administrative law. 

With an LLM in health law from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, she advises providers and institutions in navigating federal and state healthcare regulations. Before focusing on health law, Lennon gained experience in general practice, which informs a well-rounded, strategic approach to client advocacy. 

She is admitted to practice in Minnesota and Michigan and is active in professional organizations focused on health law and policy. Lennon values collaboration across legal disciplines and is committed to delivering practical, business-oriented solutions. She can be reached at nlennon@chapman-lawgroup.com or at 248-644-6326.

Reprinted with permission from the Washtenaw County Legal News newsletter Res Ipsa Loquitur

As of October 1, 2025, Michigan employers with 10 or fewer employees (“small businesses”) must begin providing paid sick time under the Earned Sick Time Act (ESTA). Larger employers (11+ employees) have been covered since February 21, 2025; the small employer effective date was intentionally delayed to give the smallest operations time to prepare.

As of October 1, 2025, Michigan employers with 10 or fewer employees (“small businesses”) must begin providing paid sick time under the Earned Sick Time Act (ESTA). Larger employers (11+ employees) have been covered since February 21, 2025; the small employer effective date was intentionally delayed to give the smallest operations time to prepare.

Who counts toward “10 or fewer”?

Headcount is calculated broadly. Employers must include all employees across the United States and its territories—full-time, part-time, and temporary workers, including those supplied by staffing agencies. Employers who reach 11 or more employees for 20 or more workweeks in the current or prior calendar year are treated as a larger employer through the end of that year and the next.

How sick time accrues and can be used

Under ESTA, employees accrue one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. Small employers may limit both carryover and use to 40 hours per year (larger employers use a 72-hour cap). Unused paid sick time rolls over year to year, up to 40 hours for small employers.  

Alternatively, employers can frontload sick time at the start of each year to avoid tracking accrual and carryover. For small employers, that means providing at least 40 hours up front for full-time employees, with prorated amounts for part-time staff (subject to specific notice and “true-up” requirements).  

For small employers, accrual begins the later of October 1, 2025 or the employee’s start date. Employers using the accrual method may impose a waiting period of up to 120 days before new hires (on or after February 21, 2025) can use accrued time; during the waiting period, hours still accrue. Frontloaded time is available for immediate use and may not impose a waiting period.

What counts as “sick time” under the law

ESTA leave is broadly available for an employee’s own illness or preventative care, care for a family member, and certain needs related to domestic violence or sexual assault. Employers may track usage in one-hour increments (or the smallest timekeeping increment) and must compensate time off at the employee’s regular hourly rate (exclusive of overtime premiums, bonuses, commissions, tips, and holiday pay).

PTO policies can satisfy ESTA—if they meet or exceed the law

Employers already offering a paid time off (PTO) bank can use it to comply so long as it is at least as generous as ESTA (for small employers, at least 40 hours per year) and can be used for the same purposes on the same timelines. Many small employers will find this approach simplest, but review accrual, caps, and carryover to ensure alignment.

Required notices and posting

By 30 days after the February 21, 2025 amendments (or at hire, whichever is later), employers must provide written notice describing ESTA rights, the measurement “year,” usage rules, anti-retaliation protections, and the right to file a complaint. Employers must also display the state workplace poster in English, Spanish, and any other language that is the first language for 10% or more of the workforce if the state has provided a translation.

Action checklist for small employers (=10 employees)

1. Confirm headcount status. Count all U.S. employees—including temps and staffing-agency workers—and document weekly totals for the 20-week threshold analysis.  

2. Choose your method: accrual (1 per 30 hours, cap/use/rollover at 40) or frontload (40 hours for full-time; prorate part-time). Frontloading simplifies tracking but requires careful onboarding notices and potential true-
ups.  

3. Align your PTO policy. If you use a general PTO bank, ensure it provides at least 40 hours and can be used for ESTA-covered reasons without extra hurdles.  

4. Set a waiting-period rule (optional). If using accrual, decide whether to apply up to 120 days for new hires (who still accrue during that period).  

5. Update payroll and timekeeping. Configure accruals or frontloads, carryover limits, and usage caps, and pay at the correct regular rate.  

6. Issue required notices and post the state poster in the necessary languages. Train managers on anti-retaliation and consistent administration.  

7. Calendar policy start date: If using accrual for eligible employees, employers should have begun no later than October 1, 2025 (or date of hire, if later) and be prepared to accept covered uses immediately if frontloaded.
Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO) maintains plain-language guidance, including a February 27, 2025 slide deck that summarizes the 40-hour small-employer caps, the October 1, 2025 compliance date, frontloading options, notice requirements, and more. For complex scenarios like fluctuating headcount, multi-state operations, or collective bargaining agreements, employers should seek out legal counsel to tailor a policy and rollout.

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Zana Tomich is co-founder of Dalton & Tomich, a versatile Detroit-based law firm, where she works with lending institutions and privately held businesses and nonprofits, often in a general counsel capacity.

Founding a successful startup has never been easy, but a little-known U.S. Supreme Court ruling has made it even more difficult in recent years by enabling corporations that use startups' patented technology without permission to get off nearly scot-free.

Founding a successful startup has never been easy, but a little-known U.S. Supreme Court ruling has made it even more difficult in recent years by enabling corporations that use startups' patented technology without permission to get off nearly scot-free.

Now, Congress has a chance to set things right. On February 25, Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., reintroduced the Realizing Engineering, Science, and Technology Opportunities by Restoring Exclusive, or RESTORE, Patent Rights Act, a bipartisan bill that would enable startups and other patent holders to block infringers from unlawfully exploiting their patented technology.

For nearly all of our country's history, an injunction — a court order stopping infringers from continuing to use and sell technology without permission — was the standard remedy for patent infringement.

By enforcing exclusive rights as articulated in the U.S. Constitution and patent law, courts upheld the principle that inventors, not usurpers, should control how their technology is used and marketed. It incentivized investment in high-cost, high-risk, high-reward research, and provided startups and small businesses with a fighting chance against entrenched companies, including industry giants.

But the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange LLC upended this long-standing principle. The ruling imposed a multifactor balancing test that made it significantly harder, if not impossible, for many inventors and patent holders to obtain an injunction and block unauthorized use, even after proving infringement.

Since the eBay decision, injunction grants in patent infringement cases dropped by more than 65 percent for operating companies and over 90 percent for startups, research institutions, or others that do not manufacture products that incorporate the patented technologies.

Patent owners have functionally lost control over the patented innovations they own. The eBay ruling effectively legalized forced patent licensing, stripping inventors of their exclusive rights while letting industry titans and other infringers profit from copied or stolen innovation.

This erosion of patent rights is undermining America's innovation economy. IP-intensive industries contribute over 40 percent of U.S. GDP and support tens of millions of jobs, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data from 2019. 
But as patent protections weaken, investment in cutting-edge research slows. Venture capitalists become increasingly hesitant to fund startups and small companies when patents can no longer provide meaningful protection.

The RESTORE Patent Rights Act would fix the problem.

The bill would reestablish injunctions as the default remedy for proven patent infringement, just as they were prior to the eBay decision.

By passing the RESTORE Patent Rights Act, Congress would create real consequences for patent copying, deterring large corporate infringers that currently see litigation as just another cost of doing business. The bill would restore confidence in the U.S. patent system, giving startups and inventors the protection they need to take risks and drive technological progress. And it would keep America economically competitive in the race for next-generation technologies.

For nearly two decades, the eBay decision has distorted our innovation ecosystem, rewarding copying over creation and corporate might over individual ingenuity. The RESTORE Patent Rights Act offers an opportunity to correct the course we are on. Congress should not hesitate to take it.

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Paul Michel served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit from 1988 to his retirement in 2010, and as its chief judge from 2004-10. He currently serves on the board of the Council for Innovation Promotion.

What if lawmakers fixed a problem and no one noticed? We don’t have to speculate. The political debate is filled with problems that were solved decades ago but that people don’t seem to have noticed. It leads to pandering and a lot of bad policy.

Consider this progressive call “to ensure corporate polluters are held accountable for the damage they do.” The United States fixed this in the 1970s when federal laws made companies liable for environmental harms. Fear of lawsuits has 
drastically changed industrial practice, and environmental measures have drastically improved over the past fifty years.

Yet calls to make sure corporate polluters are punished continue. This is because politicians want to address people’s concerns. And if people don’t know that the issue has already been dealt with, elected officials can gain support by dealing with it again.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wanted to ensure that no child went hungry at school. The National School Lunch Program already pays for the school meals of families with limited means. The governor’s policy change was to have taxpayers cover the costs of meals for children in wealthy families. Whitmer didn’t try to identify issues where the school lunch program was failing to provide meals to kids who need it. She just extended it where it doesn’t belong.

Paying for meals of kids who are in no danger of missing a meal won’t do anything about hunger. Yet because the problem sounds plausible, and because enough people think it sounds like a good idea, lawmakers feel like solving a problem that has already been solved.

Education policy is filled with problems that were already solved. Poor urban school districts tend to get more money than others — not less, as is often claimed. Schools are not overcrowded; there are just 14 students per teacher in the state.

Perhaps the biggest, most believed, problem that has already been solved is school funding. When including all federal, state and local sources, the average school gets $23,700 per student. Even if we write off all the programs the state and federal governments fund and payments made, looking only at the state’s minimum per-pupil payments to schools, taxpayers spend around $200,000 for a 20-student classroom.

Federal, state and local governments spent $833 billion on primary and secondary education nationwide in 2022. The only services that get more money are federal entitlements. 

In comparison, the federal government spent just $766 billion on the military that year.

There is no magic number for education funding, so determining whether schools are underfunded, appropriately funded, or overfunded is a matter of opinion. Still, people ought to care more about whether spending is effective rather than whether funding is adequate. They ought to notice that private and charter schools tend to spend less while delivering more. Lawmakers ought to debate how to improve education outcomes, not whether to increase the already generous amounts of funding they provide.

Interest groups can exploit the false perception that solved problems are unsolved. The people working and managing schools would like everyone to think that schools are underfunded. It’s easier to get more money from lawmakers that way.

Lawmakers also gain popularity when they pretend to fix a problem that has already been addressed. Just look at the myriad job training initiatives launched by lawmakers. There are dozens of programs that try to get people valuable workplace skills. Lawmakers keep adding more when they ought to review the effectiveness of the existing programs.

The fact that so many people are worried about problems lawmakers have already addressed is the reason why lawmakers pay attention to it. Elected officials care about doing what their voters want. And if voters are worried about underfunded schools, then the people’s elected representatives are going to give them more of what they want.

Lawmakers would do better by digging in to improve existing policy — if there are remaining problems — than fixing problems that are already fixed. But it would be better if everyone had a better grasp of the policies already in place. 
Don’t fall for things that just sound plausible and politicians will deliver fewer fake solutions.

James M. Hohman is the director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

My brother-in-law, age 37, is a cryptocurrency fanatic while my father, age 87, is a Warren Buffett devotee. My brother-in-law has travelled the world attending conferences discussing the possibilities of cryptocurrencies.

My brother-in-law, age 37, is a cryptocurrency fanatic while my father, age 87, is a Warren Buffett devotee. My brother-in-law has travelled the world attending conferences discussing the possibilities of cryptocurrencies. My father attended the Berkshire Hathaway May 2009 annual meeting to better understand the aftermath of the financial crisis. My brother-in-law has spent most of his professional life working virtually while my dad went to an office every day. During the holidays, my father dons a coat and tie while my brother-in-law wears a Bitcoin ugly sweater. They are from two different generations, and they represent two different approaches to investing and retirement planning. 

The Trump Administration is going with my brother-in-law on this one. 

In what are expected to be a package of executive orders and regulatory advisories issued by the President and his Secretary of Labor, the administration has announced plans to allow 401k accounts to invest in new retirement products. The administration announced that it intends to allow employees to make investments in cryptocurrencies, private equity, hedge funds, and precious metals as they save for retirement. 
This is a seismic shift in U.S. public policy. 

How it will turn out, no one really knows. 

For those of my father’s generation, the key to successful retirement planning was to always “pay yourself first” - putting money into blue chip stocks and government bonds. His generation believed that when it came to investing, the more boring, the better. My father’s generation used dollar-cost averaging, a disciplined and patient investing approach with the idea that steadiness will lead to financial security. Investing in low-cost index funds and government bonds is typical of this saving style. The idea is that by purchasing shares in the market and government bonds, the investments will do the work themselves – no stock-picking or reading complex financial statements. 

In the relatively new world of cryptocurrencies, the “investments” appear to yield incredible sums of tradable wealth rather quickly. Stories of overnight millionaires zooming around Miami on miniyachts abound. 
Although, to be fair, these stories of great wealth-making are balanced out by stories of fraud and organized crime organizations taking advantage of blockchain technologies to launder money or pull off scams. To the outsider, crypto can seem risky and scary. 

Along with crypto, another new frontier is allowing savers to invest in “alternative” investments like private equity and hedge funds. While such investment products have a longer history than cryptocurrencies, they have traditionally been legally restricted to institutional investors and wealthy individuals. 

Alternative investments have been associated with higher-than-average management fees and restrictions on withdrawals. The standard management fee charges on private market investments are a 2% sales charge and with a 20% annual charge on all profits (there may be other fees as well) along with restrictions on withdrawals. Investments of this kind can limit the ability to withdraw for as long as ten years. 

What is unclear is just how this new selection of retirement investment options will work practically. There are going to be some obvious administrative challenges. For example, how will these new private investments be sold to new investors, and how will they be priced? Most alternative investments are limited partnerships – how will that change? Alternative investments also rely on secondary markets to offload underperforming assets or to quickly extract cash. How will that work? How will cryptocurrencies be priced ten years from now?

There seems to be a looming issue over the appropriateness of the management fees charged and what type of liquidity will be available for savers and retirees. Cryptocurrencies appear to rely upon a purely market valuation (whatever someone is willing to pay is the price) so the management fee structure of both types of investments will have to be created. 

In recent years, extensive litigation has been filed against employers for selecting investment options that were high cost. Many successful lawsuits have been brought against benefit plans arguing that the management fees charged on investment accounts were excessive. Similarly, many large institutional investors, like Yale University and the University of California, are trying to exit private markets. They have been forced to offload their private equity and hedge fund investments into the secondary market, reportedly at some discount (or in some cases pairing their most valuable investments with their underperforming ones to attract buyers).

Perhaps realizing that ERISA’s fiduciary duty owed to retirement savers in 401k plans might conflict with offering cryptocurrencies or alternative investments in employee benefit plans, the Trump administration is floating safe harbor rules that might alleviate employer plan sponsors from fiduciary liability for offering such funds. It may be a hard sell to defend the cost and suitability of these investments for the average saver under ERISA’s rules. 

Indeed, this is a Brave New World for 401k retirement plans – and it is one my dad’s generation will likely avoid, and one my brother-in-law’s generation appears ready to explore. 

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John Joseph (J.J.) Conway is an employee benefits and ERISA attorney and litigator and founder of J.J. Conway Law in Royal Oak.

When the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce engagement announcement was made, a reporter covering national news, breathlessly gushed that the “world was stunned.”