AI Terms, 'Coffee Badging' Among Top New Words In Law

By Emily Sawicki

Law360 (December 12, 2024) -- Burton's Legal Thesaurus recently announced this year's top new words in law, with entries like "coffee badging" and "hot-tubbing" joining the echelons of 2022's "meme stock" and 2023's "hallucination" as the thesaurus brings to light some of the most novel terms and talking points for lawyers in 2024.

Picture it: It's 8 a.m., and you're finishing a stale bagel you found in the kitchenette. It's finally time to file that motion. You were up until 2 o'clock this morning perfecting it from your dining room table. But in the all too bright light of day, you see it for what it really is: "word salad."

Though originally used by psychiatrists describing "incoherent speech as a symptom of mental illness," Burton's explains in its description of the new term, "word salad" has evolved to "describe any nonsensical verbiage." As you may imagine, the thesaurus points out it is best to avoid in legal writing. Or try this: Your company just announced it's purchased the latest, greatest artificial intelligence tool.

This thing is going to change your job forever, corporate leadership promises, and implementation is immediate. But for some reason, in-house legal can barely get a coherent answer out of it. Uh-oh. Was your company just taken in by "AI washing"?

Another top new word for this year, "AI washing" is defined in part as "misleading advertising regarding an AI product's effectiveness," according to the thesaurus's announcement. Regulators are turning a sharper eye toward the way businesses market their AI tools to clean up the market from such misrepresentations.

Each year, a group of law professors put their heads together to compile a new list of legal terms that point to lawyers' experiences, with this update dominated by AI-related terms like "AI agent," "AI liability," "AI reasoning" and "AI washing," as well as a "slop" or "sea of junk," referring to "poor quality content generated by AI."

This year's list was drawn up by a select committee headed by University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor of legal writing Margaret Wu, with help from Cindy Thomas Archer, professor of lawyering skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and Megan Ma, associate director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology.

Wu, who has sat on the committee for the past four years, noted that while both last year's and this year's lists were dominated by AI-related terms, the words are evolving as lawyers are getting a handle on the new technology.

"I think last year's list was more, 'What is the technology?'" Wu said in an interview with Law360 on Thursday. "I think more of the words this year are kind of, 'What are some of the legal effects that are coming out, in terms of the liability that may arise from this type of technology?'"

Near the end of each year, Wu and her colleagues gather terms they feel arose or evolved in usage over the previous year, coupled with suggestions from William C. Burton, the creator of the eponymous thesaurus.

"We look at terms, both terms that are brand new — and I think especially in the technology area, there's some new terms that come up — and also some terms that I think of as more developing terminology," Wu said. "They maybe have been around for a while, but now have sort of different meanings or [have] taken on different importance. We go through and try to find words that we think are interesting, and seem to be growing in popularity and words that we think would be helpful for both practicing lawyers as well as legal scholars to be aware of."

In a statement, Burton said compiling the list was a way for the thesaurus to promote "accuracy and exactitude of communication."

"I am delighted the profession now has a highly qualified academic body which evaluates new words and expressions in law each year and records them for posterity," he said, thanking Wu and the other committee members for their work.

Some of this year's selections point to a shifting culture, including terms like "coffee badging," "comstockery," "cybersmear" and "hot-tubbing." Office workers required to appear in-person for certain hours may participate in what is known as "coffee badging," where they make an appearance for a "minimal period of time to comply with in-person work mandates," Burton's described.

While "quiet quitting" and "return to office" made the list in 2022, Wu pointed out "coffee badging" was a reflection of the continued evolution of post-COVID-19 workplace culture.

When it comes to trends within the practice of law, "hot-tubbing" is a new one for most American lawyers. The term, as defined by Burton's, refers to "a procedure used in bench trials whereby the experts of both parties convene with the judge and discuss the case together under oath in an attempt to reach an agreement." Also known by the less provocative term "concurrent expert evidence," "hot-tubbing" is relatively new stateside, after gaining traction in Australia.

Another new word, "cybersmear," is just what it sounds like: online defamation, usually posted anonymously. This year's committee noted that "'cybersmears' have been used to manipulate the prices of publicly traded stocks and cause reputational harm to individuals and companies, and have also led to 'John Doe' litigation to discover the identities of anonymous speakers on the internet."

Not a new concept, but newly relevant in the legal world in 2024, was "comstockery," referring to the 1873 Comstock Act. This year, as the immorality statute rose to prominence as courts considered invoking it to limit abortion access, "comstockery" entered the mainstream lexicon once again.

Other old terms made new again in 2024 are mis-, dis- and malinformation, grouped together as MDM, under the umbrella term "information disorder." While misinformation involves unintentional sharing of bad information, disinformation involves an intent to deceive, Burton's describes.

Malinformation, on the other hand, "involves sharing truthful facts that are manipulated, exaggerated or presented out of context in a misleading way to cause harm, often in sensitive contexts such as politics, national security, or personal privacy," the thesaurus states. All three are hot topics this year, as lawyers parse intent behind the sharing of false or misleading information.

--Editing by Adam LoBelia
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