ChatGPT for legal compliance: a step-by-step tutorial

Ensuring legal compliance is one of the most important responsibilities of an HR professional.

Doing due diligence on your legal compliance protects your business from costly legal disputes, and makes sure that your business is built on integrity and fairness.

It’s important, but it’s also arduous and time-consuming. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and make mistakes, especially when you’re balancing legal compliance with your other HR tasks and staying up-to-date with regulations.

ChatGPT can make the cumbersome busywork of HR legal compliance much, much simpler.

Using ChatGPT to streamline your legal compliance for HR tasks like reviewing documents and creating your checklists gives you more time and bandwidth to focus on strategic HR initiatives.

This post will offer you ways you can use ChatGPT for your own HR legal compliance framework, and give some use cases and example prompts to show how useful it can be.

The role of ChatGPT in legal compliance

Do you have a mountain of legal documents you need to look over? ChatGPT can help summarize them for you.

Do your team members and other employees keep pestering you with the same questions over and over? ChatGPT can help make an FAQ page so they’ll finally leave you alone.

ChatGPT has a million-and-one applications for HR teams. You just need to know how to tell it what to do.

Keep in mind, however, that although ChatGPT is knowledgeable about a lot of things, including human resources, ChatGPT can’t replace a human. Not yet, anyway. Anything it gives you should be scrutinized by the judgment of an HR professional.

With that said, here are some ways you can use it to make your life a little easier.

1. Customization for HR tasks

One of the things that makes ChatGPT so useful is its adaptability. It can take on any role, any voice, or any virtually any task you assign to it.

For this reason, ChatGPT can be integrated into the workflows of nearly any HR department.

For example, ChatGPT can be trained to understand the jargon and legalese of regulations like GDPR and EEOC.

2. Efficiency and accuracy

You can use ChatGPT to finish compliance-related tasks much more quickly than you could on your own while reducing the risk of human error.

This is hugely useful for any tasks that require monotonous sifting through large amounts of data and records.

Addressing concerns about generative AI hallucination

Generative AI is a wonderful tool that is capable of amazing things, but the technology is still new and it has its flaws.

Occasionally, ChatGPT will give out information that is incorrect or nonsensical. This is known as AI hallucination. It tends to occur more commonly with information and output involving people, places, and specific facts.

Don’t worry though, there are safeguards you can put in place to protect yourself from this potential pitfall.

Measures to prevent hallucination

ChatGPT and generative AI can do a lot on their own, but they still require human oversight to be useful.

Someone on your HR team needs to review any output from ChatGPT before you implement it in your HR workflows. Make sure it’s accurate and follows up-to-date HR regulations before acting on it.

The importance of context

While ChatGPT is powerful, it cannot work in a void.

ChatGPT works best when given context. The more you give it, the more it has to work with. For legal compliance tasks, think of ChatGPT as a tool that helps you and your HR team, not replaces them.

Transparency and accountability

As AI technology continues to advance, distinguishing between human and AI-made content is going to become more important.

Any advice or content generated using AI should be carefully documented. That way, you can audit your processes accurately when you need to, and spot inconsistencies and inaccuracies as they arise.

Ongoing monitoring and updates

Generative AI technology is advancing at a parabolic rate, so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with.

Keep an eye on updates to ChatGPT and make sure that it stays a useful tool for your legal compliance tasks. Understand what’s going on with AI and how to make your life as an HR professional easier.

Step-by-step guide to implementing ChatGPT for legal compliance

Now that we’ve covered some of the things that can go wrong, let’s get to the fun stuff – how ChatGPT can make life easier for you when you’re doing legal compliance tasks.

Automated compliance training

One of the most useful ways ChatGPT can help you is by training your HR team with compliance training modules.

No more glazed eyes and blank expressions as you go through stale and dry PowerPoint presentations. ChatGPT can help make compliance training into an interactive and engaging experience that your HR team will learn from.

1. Identify the compliance topics: First, identify the compliance topics you need to cover during training. That can include GDPR rules on data protection or EEOC on equal employment
2. Develop a script: Once you’ve identified what you want to cover, make a script for the AI chatbot. This will be the pillar of your training module.
3. Implement using ChatGPT: Use the script you made as an input to bring the AI chatbot to life. The platform is very easy to use, so this part should be simple.
4. Test with a small group: Try out the new legal compliance training process with a small group. Get some initial feedback and make tweaks and adjustments where you need to
5. Roll out to the entire organization: Once testing stages are successful and you’re sure the training is accurate and efficient, roll them out to the whole company

Automated compliance training example prompts

1. Generate a script for a GDPR compliance training chatbot

This prompt will help you create a conversational script for a chatbot focused on GDPR compliance training. The chatbot can guide employees through the key aspects of GDPR, answer their questions, and even quiz them on their understanding.

2. Create a quiz on EEOC regulations for the training module

Use this prompt to generate a quiz that tests employees’ knowledge of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulations. The quiz can be integrated into your existing training modules to ensure that your team is well-versed in EEOC guidelines.

Document review

One of the things that ChatGPT and other AI tools can do really well is to process and summarize large amounts of information quickly. It’s like having a supercomputer that can talk back to you.

This can be a huge asset to you when you have a mountain of legal documents you have to process and sort out quickly.

1. Upload the document: Upload the document you want to review to a secure location. That way, the information stays confidential
2. Use ChatGPT to summarize: Once the document has been safely uploaded, ChatGPT can read and summarize it. The AI will sift through all the legalese and give you a concise summary, as well as flag any potential compliance issues
3. Review the summary: Take a moment to review the summary. Is anything out of place? Or does your gut tell you anything is missing? This is the time to identify any further compliance issues that need your attention

Document review example prompts

1. Summarize this employee handbook for compliance issues

ChatGPT will read through the handbook and provide a summary that highlights areas requiring attention.

2. Review this contract for GDPR compliance

ChatGPT will scan the contract and flag any clauses or terms that may not be GDPR-compliant.

Compliance checklist generator

If your legal compliance training and your document review steer the ship and keep it sailing, then your compliance checklists are your compass.

Having ChatGPT make your legal compliance checklists can help you stay on track and make sure that nothing slips.

Your legal compliance checklists help you keep track of what needs to be done, how, and when. Using ChatGPT, you can create customized compliance checklists that are suited to the needs of your company.

1. Identify the compliance areas: Identify all the areas in your organization that have a process that needs a compliance checklist in the first place. This can be anything from onboarding new hires to internal audits
2. Use ChatGPT to generate the checklists: Once you know what those are, use ChatGPT to make the checklists themselves. Give it your requirements and away you go. You’ll have a usable checklist within minutes.
3. Review and distribute the checklists: Give them a once-over for completeness and accuracy. Then, pass your checklists around to the departments or individuals that need to implement them.

Compliance checklist generator example prompts

1. Generate a GDPR compliance checklist for new hires

Use this prompt to create a comprehensive checklist that outlines all the GDPR compliance steps new hires need to take. This can include everything from data handling to consent forms, ensuring a smooth onboarding process.

2. Create a compliance audit checklist

ChatGPT will help you generate a checklist designed for internal or external compliance audits. It will cover various aspects of compliance, from legal requirements to company policies, providing a structured way to assess your organization’s compliance status.

Data privacy compliance

Data privacy is a sensitive and delicate issue in HR legal compliance and there’s a lot that can go wrong.

While ChatGPT is not a legal expert, it can still serve as a useful starting point when you create your own internal documentation for data privacy. If nothing else, it could save you hours of time you would otherwise spend pouring through GDPR guidelines and making meticulous HR audit checklists from scratch.

Steps

1. Identify the data: First, point out what data within your organization is required to stay compliant (e.g. employee records)
2. Use ChatGPT to generate a data privacy policy: Once you know what needs to be done, use ChatGPT to make your data privacy policy. That will serve as your company’s playbook for data-handling
3. Implement and distribute the policy: Now you have your data privacy policy, so it’s time to spread it around. Make sure it’s distributed to all of the relevant departments at your company

Data privacy compliance example prompts

1. Draft a data privacy policy compliant with GDPR

Use this prompt to have ChatGPT help you draft a comprehensive data privacy policy that aligns with GDPR regulations.

2. Create a checklist for data privacy compliance

For a more hands-on approach, use this prompt to generate a checklist that outlines the steps needed for data privacy compliance.

ChatGPT-assisted legal compliance: the right side of the law

Remember that ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer and it can’t give you legal advice, and anything it gives you needs to be reviewed by an HR expert before you put it to use. That said, it can still save you a mountain of busy work and make your legal compliance audits and processes run smoother than ever.

Legal compliance is just one of the ways ChatGPT can make your day-to-day easier and better as an HR professional. Check out these ChatGPT resources and explore more ways they can help you.