Dear Overworked HR Managers and Stressed-Out Business Owners,
You’re sweating bullets over AI, aren’t you? Your employees are whispering about ChatGPT drafting their TPS reports, your competitors are bragging about “AI-driven efficiencies,” and you’re wondering if you’re one bad algorithm away from a lawsuit or, worse, irrelevance.
Relax. Treaty Oak Legal is here to cut through the buzzword fog, keep your workplace drama-free, and ensure your bottom line stays as green as a Hill Country oak. Let’s unpack the ethical use of AI in your business, inspired by the sharp insights from Jason Boulette’s recent UT Law CLE lecture, but distilled for those of you who don’t speak legalese.
AI: Your Tool, Not Your Overlord
First things first: AI isn’t Skynet, and it’s not your replacement.
As Ginni Rometty, former IBM bigwig, quipped, “AI will not replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.”
Think of AI like a really fast intern who’s great at drafting emails but occasionally makes up case law (yep, that’s happened—looking at you, Mata v. Avianca). It’s a tool to make your life easier, not a magic wand you wave to outsource your brain.
Here’s the deal: AI can churn out employee handbooks, analyze contracts, or even flag HR issues faster than you can say “hostile work environment.” But you’re still the one calling the shots. Delegate tasks to AI, sure, but don’t let it negotiate your next union contract or decide who gets the corner office.
That’s your job, and no bot’s stealing it.
Your Move: Use AI for grunt work—drafting policies, sorting resumes, or summarizing OSHA regs. But always have a human (preferably one of our attorneys) double-check the output. AI’s not licensed to practice law, and neither are you.
Confidentiality: Don’t Let AI Spill Your Secrets
You know what’s scarier than a 2 a.m. employee email titled “Hostile Work Environment Part 4”? AI leaking your company’s confidential data.
Boulette’s lecture hammered this home: AI tools, especially the free ones, can be like that coworker who overshares at happy hour. Input sensitive info—like employee discipline records or trade secrets—and it might get stored, shared, or exposed..
Remember Samsung’s fiasco? They fed proprietary code into an AI, and poof, it was out in the wild.
Your Move: Stick to paid AI services with ironclad terms of service (we’ll review them for you—call us). Read the fine print before you plug in anything juicier than a lunch order. And train your team to treat AI like a public Wi-Fi network: useful, but not for your banking password.
If you’re unsure, our team at Treaty Oak can set up protocols to keep your data safer than a lockbox at the Alamo.
Verify, Verify, Verify
AI’s got a rep for “hallucinating”—that’s tech-speak for making stuff up.
Boulette cited horror stories of lawyers filing AI-generated briefs with fake citations, leading to courtroom smackdowns. For you, this means that an AI-drafted employee termination letter might sound legit but could cite a nonexistent labor law.
Yikes.
Your Move: Treat AI output like a first draft from an overeager intern. Have your HR team or (better yet) one of our attorneys scrub it for accuracy. This isn’t just about avoiding embarrassment; it’s about dodging lawsuits. We’ve seen too many businesses blindsided by sloppy AI work. Let Treaty Oak be your safety net.
Billing: Don’t Get Greedy
Thinking of charging your employees or clients for time “saved” by AI? Don’t.
Boulette’s clear: if you’re billing hourly, you only charge for actual human time spent, not the nanoseconds AI took to spit out a report.
Here’s the good news: you can shift to value-based billing, where you charge for the outcome, not the hours. That’s where Treaty Oak shines—we deliver results that keep your profits humming, not just billable hours.
Your Move: Talk to counsel about structuring AI assisted services in your business. We’ll help you price your work based on value, not keystrokes. And if you’re paying per AI query, we can negotiate client agreements to pass those costs along legally.
Ethics vs. Rules: Be a Good Human, Not Just Compliant
Boulette’s lecture dropped a truth bomb: “If you think you’re a good person just because you’re not in prison, think again.”
Compliance with labor laws is the bare minimum. Ethical AI use means going beyond the rulebook to protect your employees and your brand.
For example, some AI chatbots might accidentally form “client relationships” with job applicants, landing you in hot water with regulators. (Florida’s bar is already sniffing around this.)
Your Move: Don’t just check boxes. Use AI to enhance your workplace—say, by streamlining onboarding or spotting bias in job descriptions—but keep your moral compass pointed north. Treaty Oak can audit your AI practices so they align with both legal compliance and real world business needs.
The Treaty Oak Promise: Profit Through Peace of Mind
AI is a powerful tool, but it is also a legal minefield when employers treat it like a decision maker instead of what it is: a fast, fallible assistant.
Treaty Oak helps employers build practical guardrails that protect confidentiality, prevent hallucination disasters, and keep leadership in control of the decisions that actually matter. That means policies that reflect real operations, training that sticks, and documentation that holds up when things get messy.
At Treaty Oak Legal, the goal is not to bury employers in compliance noise. The goal is to turn workplace AI into a practical plan that protects margins, reduces risk, and keeps leadership out of the panic cycle.
If this blog felt uncomfortably accurate, that is a sign guardrails are needed, not more panic. Contact us to build an AI use policy that fits the business and keeps “efficiency” from turning into Exhibit A.