Exploring GenAI with VAILL: Day 4 📊

A 10-day journey into human-centered GenAI for legal professionals

📊 Day 4: Research & Analysis

Welcome back! Now that you've experimented with AI basics, prompting, and content creation, let's explore how GenAI can enhance your analytical capabilities. Today, we'll discover how a GenAI tool can help you analyze data patterns and create useful visualizations.

Today's Focus: Learn to use GenAI tools for data analysis, pattern recognition, and creating clear visualizations in your work.

🎯 Learning Objectives

• Explore techniques for GenAI-assisted data analysis

• Develop strategies for pattern recognition

• Learn methods for creating effective data visualizations

📚 Key Concepts

Research and analysis are core legal skills where GenAI can serve as a powerful complement to your expertise. Think of the AI as your analytical coworker—one that can help process information, identify patterns, and create visual representations, but always needs your professional judgment to validate and interpret findings.

At VAILL, we've identified three key areas where GenAI can excel in supporting legal analysis:

1. Pattern Recognition: Finding trends and relationships in data

2. Data Organization: Structuring information for clarity and understanding

3. Visual Communication: Creating compelling representations of key insights

Remember: GenAI is excellent at processing and visualizing information quickly, but you are essential for understanding context, ensuring accuracy, and making informed legal judgments.

💡 Pro Tips

• Start with clear objectives before diving into any analysis

• Use structured prompts to guide your data exploration

• Ask GenAI to explain its analytical reasoning

• Save effective visualization prompts as templates

• Test insights against your professional experience

✍️ Today's Exercise

Let's practice using GenAI to analyze data patterns and create visual representations—skills that can help you better understand and communicate trends for your work.

1. Data Pattern Analysis: Think about a metric you track in your work (for lawyers, this might be new matter open rates, new client acquisition rates, client satisfaction scores, hours billed, hours realized - whatever is relevant to you). Then try this prompt: "I want to better understand patterns in my [chosen metric]. Please help me:

   • Identify key data points I should be tracking

   • Suggest ways to measure and compare this data

   • Create a framework for analyzing trends

   • Present this as a structured analytical framework."

2. Visual Representation: Follow up with: "Help me create a visualization to track and display this data effectively. Please provide:

   • A simple chart design using headings like [your chosen categories, based on the prompt in 1, above]

   • Labels that would make this clear to stakeholders

   • Suggestions for highlighting key patterns

   • Focus on clarity and impact for different audiences."

3. Reporting Strategy: Finally, try: "Help me develop an approach for reporting this data to:

   • Internal team members

   • Clients or external stakeholders

   • [specific audience you identify]

   • Include suggestions for highlighting different aspects for each audience."

Remember to experiment with follow-up questions about specific patterns or relationships you want to explore in your data. This is a dialogue!

🔍 Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Making visualizations too complex

• Forgetting to define clear metrics

• Overlooking the importance of context in data interpretation

🎯 Challenge (Optional)

• Find two annual reports or industry surveys relevant to your work, e.g. your practice area or a client’s business.¹ Ask ChatGPT to help you analyze and compare:
  

  "Please compare these two reports, focusing on:

  • Major trends and findings

  • Notable differences

  • Key implications for my practice area

  • Significant changes between reporting periods"
    

  Try follow-up questions about specific trends or metrics that interest you. This simple comparison approach can help you quickly extract valuable insights from industry reports and identify emerging patterns in your field.
  
  You can also try creating visuals of the relevant points of comparison, to help better understand or explain the data to various audiences.

🔄 Quick Recap

• GenAI can help identify patterns and create visualizations

• Clear metrics and structured approaches yield better results

• Your professional judgment is crucial for interpretation

• Save effective analytical frameworks for future use

📔 Reflect

Before moving on, spend a few minutes in your learning journal noting:

• A research or analysis task you engaged in over the past week that could have benefited from the GenAI techniques you learned today

• How today's GenAI applications might enhance your current workflow in other ways

• Any challenges you encountered and how you addressed them

• One specific way you'll apply today's learning in the future

Your reflections create valuable reference points for developing sustainable GenAI practices.

📚 Additional Resources

• Article: Data Analysis With ChatGPT (OpenAI)—Comprehensive overview of ChatGPT features and capabilities to work with all kinds of data

• Video: ChatGPT for Data Analytics: Beginner Tutorial (data analyst Luke Barrouse via YouTube)—an introduction to how ChatGPT (paid version) can help you engage in data analysis, including instructions on how to access ChatGPT’s highest-level data analytics functions

• Interactive: Introduction to Generative AI for Data Analysis (Microsoft via Coursera)—a 5-module online course on applying GenAI to data analysis

👉 Coming Tomorrow

Get ready to boost your productivity! Next, we'll explore how GenAI can help streamline your workflow and enhance your efficiency.

Keep experimenting with analytical techniques, and share your discoveries with us at vaill@vanderbilt.edu!

1. For example, we uploaded the International Legal Generative AI Report, Detailed Survey Findings (Lexis, 2023), and the Investing in Legal Innovation Survey, The Rise of GenAI at Top Firms & Corporations Full Survey Results (Lexis, 2024). We used ChatGPT to help us analyze and compare the reports, and visualize relevant data comparisons between the two.