Prompting for Lawyers: The Most Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Most lawyers using AI are getting weaker results than they should. Not because the tools aren't capable but because the prompts aren't. Join Pieter Buteneers, Co-Founder and CTO of Emma Legal, for a practical 60-minute session on the most common prompting pitfalls and exactly how to fix them.
What you'll walk away with
This webinar builds on Emma Legal's most-read article to date — Prompting for Lawyers: The 8 Most Common Pitfalls — and goes further. Pieter will walk through real examples, show what weak prompts actually produce, and demonstrate what strong ones look like instead. No theory. Just patterns that work.
What we'll cover
- Why your AI output is weaker than it should be.
The gap between what lawyers expect from AI and what they actually get is almost never a model problem. It's a prompting problem. Pieter will show you exactly where the breakdown happens — and how to close it. - The prompting habits that quietly undermine your analysis.
There are a handful of structural mistakes that even experienced AI users make consistently. Once you see them, you can't unsee them and your output quality shifts immediately. - How to get decision-grade answers on complex legal questions.
Vague inputs produce vague output. Pieter will show how specificity, context, and the right question structure unlock a level of analysis most lawyers haven't seen from general AI tools. - When to trust the answer — and when not to.
LLMs are trained to be agreeable. Understanding how and why they confirm your assumptions is the single most important thing a lawyer can know before relying on AI output in a high-stakes context. - What better models won't fix.
The pitfalls aren't going away with the next release. Pieter explains which limitations are structural to the technology and why the lawyers who understand this will consistently outperform those who don't.
About the speaker
Pieter Buteneers is Co-Founder and CTO of Emma Legal, with a PhD in AI and 18+ years of applied machine learning experience. He founded Chatlayer.ai before building Emma. He speaks plainly, thinks in systems, and has no patience for AI hype that doesn't translate to better legal work. Besides Emma, Pieter is a standard speaker at MLcon, one ot the leading european conferences on AI and gives workshops to DPOs on how to setup your AI security framework.