Immigration Lawyers Look to AI to Make Rote Work Faster, Cheaper

Immigration law is a lot of administrative work—standardized applications, support letters, document translation. Clients often have limited means, so time saved is money saved. And the law is federal, with one set of rules and regulations rather than 50. All of which matches up well with the advantages of generative AI. It’s why the American Immigration Lawyers Association is developing a platform called Gen, and some individual lawyers are working with engineers to develop specialized models that can speed up asylum applications. AI bots can’t reason or understand facts like humans do. A paperwork mistake could lead to missed deadlines or even impact someone’s ability to stay in the US. But an AI platform trained in immigration work can handle client memos and checklists, in addition to answering complex immigration questions, said Greg Siskind, an immigration attorney in Tennessee, who is working with his industry group on Gen. Some attorneys say the cost savings could encourage immigration lawyers to take some cases they otherwise couldn’t. “As companies keep working on it and cut out the inaccuracies, in time, it will be a very useful tool for lawyers,” said Michele Carney, a Seattle attorney. Talking About My Gen Gen, which uses GPT-4, an OpenAI language model, will have access to primary immigration laws, regulations, statutes, cases, and manuals. Its features include a privacy mode to keep client confidentiality, a built-in immigration law library that will allow a lawyer, for example, ask a question about conflicts of interests; and a “personal library” where an attorney can upload materials such as books, memos, and research. This is in addition to a more regular function such as a document summary, in which the bot can quickly condense hundred of pages into a few. The answers come with citations and links to cited documents. The well-documented AI problem of “hallucinations,” or incorrect information being created, is reduced because the bot collects information from a highly specialized library. “We’ve lowered the temperature to be more conservative in how questions are answered, and we provide citations that a lawyer can check rather than just assuming the AI knows all,” Siskind said. Another benefit: Lawyers can upload a foreign language document and get a summary in English, which can be especially helpful for visa and green card applications that include letters and documents in another language. “We actually figured out by accident that it was capable of doing that,” Siskind said. Asylum Cases In South Florida, Nadine Navarro, an immigration attorney, has been working with a few software engineers to develop DraftyAI, also using the GPT platform. It can write an entire asylum brief based on a questionnaire, she said. “We’re not claiming to produce exactly the same thing a lawyer would do but we believe it could save 80% of the time initially spent,” Navarro said. Navarro focused on asylum applications first because she said that attorneys don’t get paid enough for the workload that comes with such a case, while clients don’t often have the financial means to afford legal counsel. “We saw an opportunity to provide a product that they could use and bridge the gap,” she said. DraftyAI is in beta mode right now with about 70 users, but Navarro has ambitions to make its scope broader so that it could process waivers and employment-based applications. Carney, the Seattle attorney, said she has found ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Perplexity useful for drafting documents that are repetitive, or to help answer government requests for more evidence to support an applicant’s case. “With immigration law in particular, it is sort of the repetitive nature that makes generative AI useful,” she said. Examples include when an applicant is filing for adjustment of status, where someone with a visa applies for a green card, or a work authorization, which gives permission to certain kinds of visa holders to get employment. “If there is a well-drafted and comprehensive intake form that is fed into the AI, it can develop the application packet and screen for red flags,” she said. In family-based cases where applicants are seeking to stay in the country and not fighting an opposing party on a legal issue, AI can assist them and their attorneys finding the best pathway for them to remain in the country, she said. AI is a “refining tool” that can cut down on research time and make comparisons, said Charina Garcia, who is a strategy and innovation partner at WR Immigration in Oakland, Calif. “Many times, when we’re doing petitions, we have to understand what our client does in their field and ChatGPT actually can help us understand that,” she said. Potential Pitfalls Attorneys stressed the need to double-check or triple-check documents produced by AI, just as they would check the work of a paralegal or a junior associate, and to anonymize client information. When Carney pretended to be an applicant who needed a “hardship letter” as part of a 601A waiver in a family-based immigration case , the results were underwhelming. She said Perplexity, an AI bot, essentially repeated the facts she provided in paragraph form while the product from GPT-4 appeared more polished. “ GPT-4 drafted a well-organized letter” for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Carney said. “However, if an attorney simply relied on this letter, they would have made a mistake because I-601As are filed at the USCIS in Chicago, not in Phoenix.” That could have resulted in a significant delay and additional expenses. Amélie Vavrovsky, the founder of Formally, a legal startup in California’s Bay Area that currently has a AI product in beta testing, said her product can make suggestions on how asylum applicants might be eligible to apply for employment authorization and a fee waiver. “For attorneys, what it means is that there’s more time to actually spend with clients. The thing that distinguishes great counsel is the attention they give to their clients,” Vavrovsky said. She cautioned that the current AI products are just language models. “The biggest risk is thinking that language models can thoughtfully reflect on case and give specific advice. They can’t do that,” she said. “They don’t reason like humans reason.” Predictive Nature The future of AI and immigration law, Siskind said, is “analytics where we can do a lot more predicting on how a case is going to go.” A lawyer might be able to tell clients that they have a 10% chance of getting approved in one visa category versus a 60% chance in another, allowing attorneys to bring statistics into decision-making based on experience, he said. Siskind and his colleagues are working on another immigration AI tool that can handle more complex documents that don’t all sound the same. “We can do much more complicated things in terms of drafting than you can do in ChatGPT,” he said. But AI models can never replicate what an attorney can do to comfort someone who is upset or hysterical because the immigration process can be so stressful, with the fate of families hanging in the balance, Garcia said. “When people tell me their story, I tell them my story about how family came from the Philippines and the struggles they went through over here.” AI won’t have the same impact, she said. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.