6 Persona

If you search online for tips on prompting a GenAI tool, you will frequently find reference to setting a persona for the tool. An AI Persona is a tailored set of characteristics, mannerisms, key skills and behaviours that you want the AI to adopt during your interaction.

You have already come across something like this: in the CRISP and PREPARE framework, the first R represents ROLE. The persona extends role by including characteristics or expertise you want the GenAI to exhibit.

In the PREPARE discussion example, for Role, we used:

to describe the role the AI should assume when responding to the task.

This is a simple version of setting a Persona. We’ve told the AI to have specific areas of knowledge and skill level. We should, of course, have specified the country or jurisdiction that the lawyer is working in. Laws are different in different countries. The internet has more examples of American legal training data, and this will result in a bias toward American Law unless you specify your working country.

More complex personas can include adding more personality or describing character traits such as ‘attention to detail when it comes to the accurate presentation of facts’ that can direct the AI to respond in particular ways.

In the workplace, teams can develop and refine the task personas over time, tweaking them to improve their performance. It’s not uncommon for larger organisations to maintain a library of personas, alongside their prompt libraries, to consistently support common tasks within the workflows.

When using an LLM for legal advice and information, it might be useful to use the persona of ‘a solicitor specialising in English law, explaining the law to a non-lawyer’, or ‘a solicitor specialising in English law who is representing the other party in the proceedings’, or ‘an English lawyer who specialises in contract analysis’.

Here are two examples of just such persona suitable for specific legal tasks:

Pick a case

Timing: Allow 5 minutes

Pick a case and ask GenAI to hold a conversation to supply informative responses to questions about that case. This could be a case you have read about in the news or on social media, or something you learnt in your studies. Interact with the GenAI to see how it responds.

Now start a new chat and supply the same prompt as above, but precede it with the persona of a party in the court proceedings, or the judge. How does this change the responses and the conversation you have about the event? Does it make the account more compelling?

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Discussion

We chose the case of Donoghue v Stevenson, the ‘snail in the ginger beer’ bottle case which established the law of negligence. Our initial prompt was: In no more than 100 words explain the case of Donoghue v Stevenson. This produced the following response:

Donoghue v Stevenson (1932) is a landmark case in English law that established the modern concept of negligence. Mrs. Donoghue consumed ginger beer bought by a friend, which contained a decomposed snail. She suffered illness and sued the manufacturer, Mr. Stevenson. The House of Lords held that a manufacturer owes a duty of care to the ultimate consumer. Lord Atkin’s "neighbour principle" stated one must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions likely to injure their "neighbour" – those closely and directly affected by their actions. This case laid the foundation for the modern law of negligence.

We then used the persona of Mrs Donoghue, the applicant in the case. When we asked the LLM to act as Mrs Donoghue, it produced the following response, which was much more immediate and compelling:

Certainly! Here’s Mrs. Donoghue speaking in the first person, telling her story:

My name is May Donoghue. It was the 26th of August, 1928, when a friend and I went to the Wellmeadow Café in Paisley. My friend bought me a bottle of ginger beer. It came in an opaque bottle, so I couldn’t see inside. I drank some, and then, to my horror, a decomposed snail slipped out into my glass. Soon after, I fell ill – violent stomach pains and severe shock.

I wasn’t the one who bought the drink, so I couldn’t sue the café. But I believed the manufacturer, Mr. Stevenson, owed me a duty of care. I took the case to court, and in 1932, the House of Lords agreed. They said he had a responsibility to people like me – the ultimate consumer. That case changed the law forever, giving ordinary people protection from carelessness. They call it the "neighbour principle" now, but for me, it was about standing up for what was right.

You have considered different ways to use prompts to encourage an LLM to provide the most relevant information possible. The next section will consider the importance of critically evaluating the outputs to ensure their accuracy.