The Jerry Rosenberg Principle: Why Real Lawyers Still Matter
About law firms using AI for blogs, web pages, articles, or maybe even social media: don’t use it unless there is a lawyer—not the marketing director, not a paralegal, not a tech-savvy friend—reading everything Grok, Gemini, Chat GPT, and the rest are kicking out. (Actually, you shouldn’t have these or any other people without law degrees and experience even talking to these, um, entities—but that’s a subject for another day).
Why? Because Jerry Rosenberg, that’s why.
Jerry was the first inmate in New York history to earn a law degree in prison. This was in the mid-1960s. By 1970 he was the go-to guy in Attica prison, the most respected legal mind in the place. In 1971, he was one of the trusted advisors to the organizers of the Attica inmate takeover.
When a federal court judge in Upstate New York signed an injunction that gave the inmates almost everything they wanted, it was delivered to the leaders—who immediately handed it to Jerry for his analysis. Jerry glanced it over for all of 30 seconds, then ripped it up. Literally.
“It’s not valid,” he said, “it doesn’t have the judge’s seal on it.”
That was it. Two days later Governor Rockefeller sent in the troops and forty-three people died.
A judge’s seal, of course, is just not a thing. But Jerry had seen one once and, absent real experience in federal court aside filing the occasional federal tort and civil rights claim, knew nothing beyond what his mail-order law books had taught him.
Again, if you do not have a lawyer looking over everything AI produces (especially Grok—it’s fast and good only if coached every step of the way), you’re playing with making a bomb while watching a YouTube how-to video.
Law School Flashbacks: Missing the Issue, Missing the Point
We’ve all been in law school classes where the same people, every class (you were sure to win Contracts Bingo in my class if you had the woman in the fourth row, third seat over) missed the issue every single time.
We’ve also all been there in the bar after a final, explaining to a classmate that they had just written six blue books on something not the issue. They’d get a C for their reasoning, graduate, and all that, but still—they missed the issue. For all we know, they’re still missing the issue as a practicing attorney or judge.
We’ve all had cases where the people on the other side missed the issue to the point where we were talking different languages.
AI is exactly this.
Feed it the issue, have it expand on the issue, deep dive into the issue, research the issue, and it’s fine. Ask it to find the issue, it will most likely pull you into a rabbit hole.
Why AI Will Always Miss the Real Story
If you ask AI to get creative with a story—say you’re a business firm looking for an angle to write a business law piece from the NBA gambling scandal (you know, cashing in on a hot story)—you’ll get something flat, obvious, and wrong.
Take the NBA gambling cases. Perfect for white-collar criminal law, right? Look a little deeper, however, and it’s perfect for contracts and franchise law—maybe even arbitration.
There was something about the NBA Terry Rozier story that got us thinking. Something seemed off, there had to be something deeper than just Rozier making sure the under paid off on his performance. Half a dozen articles from The Athletic. A few more from The Washington Post, then Rolling Stone. A bunch of podcasts that included table reads of actual text, emails, federal indictments...
…and there it was—the perfect franchise/contract/arbitration/litigation theme. More posts will follow for months as more people are arrested, indicted, and trials start.
AI would never have found this.
We—humans—have the time, the means, the expertise to dive into stories and figure out how to use the latest news for areas of the law no one else would think of.
AI doesn’t connect themes, it connects words.
It doesn’t understand nuance, tone, or why or how one detail changes everything. What it does do, it certainly does confidently. It will tell you that if you question it. It’s Jerry Rosenberg tearing up the injunction confident.
We find the underlying themes and issues so we can get versions of the latest, hottest stories out to clients in practice areas that seemingly don’t align with the story. On the surface.
That’s what separates humans from algorithms, experts from dabblers, and writers from typists. You can automate syntax; you can’t automate insight.
