Law firms live by their documents. Throughout the duration of any case, you’re likely to encounter pages and pages of PDFs that need to be read, analyzed and summarized. And there are only so many hours in a day. What if a bot could do it for you? Good news. It can.
ChatGPT can summarize case files, compose legal briefs, draft legal arguments and more. It can even take hundreds and hundreds of words of text and analyze it in a blink. For file formats like PDFs, however, it can be a bit more challenging, but there are ways to do it. Here are a few methods to try.
Ways to Input PDF Files to ChatGPT
- Convert the PDF to Text – Method 1 is to convert the file into a text format. Various online tools can convert PDFs to plain text, and once you have the text, you can easily copy and paste to input the content into ChatGPT for analysis. If you don’t want to convert the whole file, you can also just copy and paste sections directly from the PDF.
- Provide a URL – If the PDF is housed online, you can simply provide the web address of the PDF you want to reference. From there, just ask it what you want it to do. For example, “Summarize section one in 500 words or less.”
- Use a ChatGPT App – There are numerous artificial intelligence tools for law firms to use with case research, including third-party ChatGPT-based tools. Examples include ChatPDF, AskYourPdf, Docalysis and others. Many of these tools can also handle PDFs exceeding 100 pages.
Once you’ve input your PDF, you’ll need to use effective prompts to extract information. For example:
- “What are the key facts mentioned in the document?”
- “Can you summarize the main arguments presented in the PDF?”
- “Identify any references to legal statutes or case law within the document.”
Being able to input lengthy PDFs into ChatGPT can literally save your firm hours. For other ways to use technology to boost productivity, turn to us at Honeycrisp. We partner exclusively with Apple-loving lawyers to help them identify opportunities to streamline their tech operations, improve productivity and increase their billable hours.
