In-house lawyers, a quick, practical AI tip - this is something I do for basically all my prompts and have saved it as a shortcut so that I can apply it on autopilot.

At the end of your prompt, add:

Ask me 3 clarifying questions before you generate the output.

It adds a little bit more effort to each workflow, but I find it improves the output about 80% of the time by asking me to add context I forgot or raises a perspective I hadn't thought of.

Usually only 1-2 of the 3 clarifying questions are helpful, but are often very helpful. Plus most LLMs will skip straight to the output where you leave questions unanswered. Occasionally the LLM will get confused and add clarifying questions into the output as opposed to the chat box, which is unhelpful, but rare.

I have not added it to any system prompts though because sometimes I use a simple, zero-shot prompt where risk is low and speed is the priority (like asking for a table of countries by Eurovision wins - no clarification necessary, I want to know it now, and it's low stakes if the table is wrong).

I have played around with skewing the clarifying questions to make them more relevant to me or the legal profession, but I've found it's cleaner and more effective just to let the LLM clarify what it's most confused about.

Overall, my experience is it adds to effectiveness while having neutral or positive impact on risk.

Always keen to hear how lawyers are using AI and catch up for coffees if you are stuck for practical uses. Let me know if you have a standard add on to your prompts that you use frequently? Do you have a suggestion to improve my prompt add on?

[I do not use AI to write any of my posts.]