April 2026 by Cliff McKinney |
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth – nothing more. -Morpheus, The Matrix.
There are many different strategies and techniques that can be applied to prompt engineering. However, there are six methods that are particularly useful for lawyers:
Chunking, which involves dividing a large task into smaller, more manageable request;
Few-shot prompting, which involves giving artificial intelligence examples to guide a response;
Iterative prompt refinement, which involves repeatedly rephrasing or refining questions to lead to a better response;
Prompt chaining, which involves guiding the artificial intelligence through related multi-step reasoning;
Flipped interaction prompting, which involves asking the artificial intelligence to ask the user questions to prompt new thoughts, like the Socratic method; and
Perspective switching, which involves asking the artificial intelligence to view its output from various perspectives to identify and eliminate weaknesses.
Each of these six techniques will be considered in detail in the subsequent entries in this series, culminating in a final example that combines all the techniques to perform a legal task. In this part, we are going to explore chunking and few-shot prompting.
The above is an excerpt of an article published for Arkansas Law Notes. This is the eighth installment of a ten-part series on the use of artificial intelligence in the legal profession. You may click the link below to read the full article.
A managing member of Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull PLLC, Cliff McKinney speaks nationwide on the rapidly evolving role of AI in law practice, covering cutting-edge tools, prompt engineering, ethical obligations, risk management, and actionable strategies lawyers can implement immediately. He has presented for organizations including the American Bar Association (ABA), the American College of Real Estate Lawyers (ACREL), the American College of Mortgage Attorneys (ACMA), and has written extensively on AI for ACMA, USLAW, and the Arkansas Law Review. Mr. McKinney holds a Prompt Engineering Specialization certification from Vanderbilt University and is a Fellow of both the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and the American College of Mortgage Attorneys.