Cassa Forense, the Italian lawyers’ pension and welfare body, put a webinar on artificial intelligence in the diary for 25 September, online only, on Microsoft Teams. The title was already a statement of intent: AI for Lawyers, Legal Prompting, how to use AI. The programme announced institutional greetings from the body’s President, Maria Annunziata, followed by two practising lawyers, Ciro Catalano and Federico Gallo, on the practical use of AI in professional work. And it announced that the event was in the process of accreditation with the National Bar Council for three training credits in professional ethics.
Read that last line again, because it is the most interesting thing about the whole design.
Three ethics credits requested for learning to phrase a request
Not credits in legal informatics. Not credits in professional liability. Ethics, for an event whose headline subject is how to formulate effective requests to a generative system.
The implication is that professional integrity, in the age of generative systems, is somehow located in the quality of the instruction given to a machine. It is not. A well-constructed prompt produces a better draft. It does not produce a correct one, and it certainly does not produce a defensible one. Integrity lives entirely in what the lawyer does afterwards, when the output comes back fluent, confident, formatted like a real document and wrong in a place that only a specialist would notice.
There is nothing empty about prompting as a skill. The quality of what these systems return genuinely depends on how clearly the objective, the constraints and the context are stated, and lawyers who treat the tool as a search box get what they deserve. But it is an instrumental competence. No prompting technique prevents a model from inventing a precedent with a perfectly straight face. The only thing that stops that reaching a client is a professional who checks. Verification is not an accessory to innovation. It is the job.
It is worth being precise about what the announcement actually claims. The credits were described as pending accreditation, not granted. Whether the National Bar Council agreed that a session on prompting belongs in the ethics column is a separate question, and the notice does not answer it. The request itself is the revealing part.
Training and access in the same session
The programme also stated that the event would present the agreements the body has activated to give its members access to AI based solutions, as part of its work on innovation and digital transformation of the profession.
So: an institutional welcome, a session explaining how to use the technology, and a session explaining the terms on which members can now obtain it. Efficient, certainly. Also a structure in which the organisation teaching you to use a class of product is the same organisation arranging your access to specific products within it.
One may believe those arrangements are excellent for members and still notice the shape of the thing. An event that combines instruction on a technology with the presentation of the channel for acquiring it is doing two jobs that are usually kept apart, and kept apart for reasons that have nothing to do with pedantry. Calling the whole package professional education does not dissolve the overlap.
The question the profession is actually facing
The hard problem in front of the legal profession is not how to phrase requests. It is attribution of responsibility. When a system used inside a firm produces an error that damages a client, who answers for it, on what basis, and with what evidence that the tool was governed rather than merely adopted.
That question involves the duties of diligence and competence that bind the lawyer personally and cannot be delegated to software, the contractual relationship with the client, the configuration decisions taken by the firm, and the documentation that makes it possible to reconstruct where a decision was actually made. None of it is solved by better phrasing.
Preparing a profession for this by teaching it to ask more clearly is like handing someone the keys to a very fast car and organising a course on how to turn the ignition. The ignition is not where the accidents happen.
What three ethics credits could carry
An ethics module that earned the label would have material of a different kind in front of it. What must be told to the client, and when. What a firm has to retain in order to demonstrate, later, how the tool was supervised. Which activities cannot be delegated to a system regardless of how convincing its output looks. What happens to confidentiality when case material is typed into an interface whose data flows nobody in the firm has read.
The published notice does not mention any of it. Those subjects are unglamorous, they do not photograph well in a promotional announcement, and they have no access agreement attached. Prompting has all three advantages, which is a reasonable explanation for which of them ended up in the title.
Raffaele Di Marzio
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