Not long ago a Saskatchewan farmer replied to a photo of a contract with a thumbs up. He said he only meant it as a way of saying he'd seen it. The court read it as a yes, and the gap between those two meanings cost him about $82,000. That's what made it a cautionary tale. It was confusion. One symbol that meant one thing to the person who sent it and something else to the person who got it, and the law had to decide which one counted.
So here's what a lot of people are Googling right now. Can you use ChatGPT for legal cases? The tool that answers you comes with a little ✨ next to the button, offering to draft, summarize, research, or produce whatever you ask for. The sparkle is a different problem than the thumbs up, and it's a worse one, because the danger isn't confusion anymore.
With the thumbs up, nobody was sure what it meant. With the sparkle, everybody knows what it means. It means a machine made this. The danger isn't that people read the symbol wrong. It's that they think it does something it doesn't. There's a quiet assumption sitting underneath that little sparkle, that content a machine wrote is somehow lighter, that it counts for less, that pointing at the tool hands the responsibility off to someone else. It doesn't. Content gets judged by what it is, not by what made it. If it's false, it's false. If it binds you, it binds you. There's no softer set of rules for the stuff a machine wrote, and no court has offered to invent one.
That's the part people don't see coming until it's too late to matter. In a British Columbia courtroom, in Zhang v Chen, 2024 BCSC 285, cases that a chatbot produced were put in front of the court to back up an argument. They read like real authority. They didn't exist. What decided it wasn't that a machine made them. It was that they were false, and false is false no matter what put it together. The fact that a tool was involved didn't shrink the responsibility for what got filed. It never does.
The rule the case leaves behind is worth saying in plain words. The duty to check that something's real sits with the person putting it forward, whatever made it. Blaming the tool isn't a defence. The sparkle isn't a defence. You put it forward, so you answer for it, and what you answer for is whether the content is true, not the story of where it came from.
That's the real difference between the two symbols. The thumbs up was dangerous because nobody was sure what it meant. The sparkle is dangerous because everybody's sure what it means, and they lean on it to carry a weight it was never able to carry. There's nothing standing behind a sparkle. It tells you where content came from, and where it came from is exactly the thing that stops mattering the second the content gets tested. When it counts the most, in front of someone who can hold you to it, the sparkle won't save you.
None of this means don't use the tools. It means you want a person standing between the tool and the fallout, because the one thing left standing in that moment is accountability, and only a person can carry that. Binder isn't a law firm. But through Counsel, a real lawyer researches your matter, your facts and your law, held to the same professional standard as any other lawyer, and the work gets read and stood behind by someone who's responsible for whether it's true. That's the thing a sparkle can't give you, no matter how much anyone wishes it could. It's the reliability of a real legal department without the price of one. A lot less, actually.
In the end the only thing that matters is whether the content is true, and no little symbol is ever going to stand in for that. This case is real. We checked. Several times.