AI for Legal Practice is a practical guide for lawyers, law students, legal educators, and legal professionals who want to understand what AI tools can do, where they fail, and how to use them responsibly in real legal work. The book covers the full lifecycle of AI-assisted legal practice, from understanding how generative AI actually works and where it fails, to prompt engineering, research, drafting, redlining, litigation, discovery, client communication, intake, practice management, and governance. It introduces the Prompt Blueprint framework for building reliable legal prompts and includes more than 100 ready-to-use prompts organized by task type. Grounded in ABA Formal Opinion 512 and Model Rules 1.1, 1.6, 3.3, 5.1, and 5.3, the book addresses competence, supervision, confidentiality, client disclosure, court certification requirements, data classification, HIPAA considerations, privilege protection, and AI governance and regulation. Each chapter includes concrete examples, named frameworks, and a hands-on Mini-Lab. Seven appendices and a companion resource site provide checklists, templates, scorecards, workflow logs, tool cards, and a 124-term glossary. This is not a book about AI hype or abstract theory. It is a working guide for real legal practice that shows not only how to use AI tools, but how to do so without losing judgment, credibility, or control.
Baradat, Carlos A.: - Carlos A. Baradat is an attorney licensed in Florida, digital risk counsel, and educator whose work sits at the intersection of law, technology, and professional responsibility. Recognized as a Super Lawyers Rising Star for six years, he serves as the Principal Advisor, Legal Technology & Digital Risk at Legal Tech Dynamics, a technology consulting company that advises law firms, corporate legal teams, and institutions on responsible technology adoption. He also maintains a separate law practice focused on privacy law, AI governance, and regulatory compliance. In this capacity, he regularly advises organizations on complex data privacy frameworks, including HIPAA and TCPA compliance, state specific privacy requirements, and the secure handling of protected health information (PHI) during complex corporate transactions. This practical experience ensures he confronts firsthand the same regulatory and workflow pressures the rest of the profession is navigating.For nearly fifteen years, Carlos has taught technology law, eDiscovery, and AI ethics at the university level. His academic tenure includes serving as the Chair of a university Legal Studies Department alongside ongoing adjunct professorships at multiple higher education institutions. He believes that effective legal education must accomplish two things simultaneously: build the intellectual rigor required to practice law and prepare students for the actual conditions in which that practice now takes place. The classroom should not lag the profession by a decade.He serves on the Florida Bar Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence and is the Past Chair of the Florida Bar Standing Committee on Technology. A national speaker on legal technology, digital forensics, and AI ethics, he has presented at prominent industry events including the Techno Security & Digital Forensics Conference. Through these leadership roles and years of public engagement, he has helped shape how the legal profession approaches competence, confidentiality, and supervision in an era of rapidly evolving tools.Carlos approaches artificial intelligence the way most practitioners should: skeptical, curious, and unwilling to treat client interests as a testing ground. What he found was that the technology, used carefully, creates a sharper lawyer rather than a lazier one. The same instinct that draws him to forensic analysis, pulling a complex system apart to understand exactly how it works, shapes how he teaches AI to other lawyers. He presents it not as magic or a threat but as a set of capabilities and limits that competent professionals must learn to navigate.Beyond writing this book, he produces content and teaches under The Virtual Jurist, his ongoing media and education project at thevirtualjurist.com.
