Law and legal practice has always been heavy with paperwork, documentation, and rigid structures, but does it have to be? When Artificial Intelligence (AI) first sprung into the world, its potential was limitless. The way AI has revolutionized industries is nothing close to what anyone anticipated. What AI means to a field so precise and delicate has been a topic of controversy since AI’s birth, demanding the question: how can justice be administered in the digital age?
One of the most significant impacts of AI on legal practices is in document reviewing and legal research. Conventionally, legal teams would manually review endless documents to gather evidence for the discovery phase. Now, most AI tools can go through the same documents in seconds, gathering relevant information at a rate human workers can’t. The way AI does this is by using natural language processing in order to understand legal jargon and context, reducing human error and improving efficiency.
The other component of law that’s been transformed by AI is legal research. Antecedently, hours of hands-on research was required to find contextual case law, legal precedents and statutes. Usually, such grueling and grunt work is given to the lowest in legal firms’ hierarchy, interns and paralegals. The introduction of AI such as Ross Intelligence and LexisNexis has practically erased the need for laborious work, rapidly analyzing expansive legal databases. Not only do they gather contextual cases, but aid lawyers by suggesting probable laws, improving the efficiency and accuracy of legal research.
Contracts constitute the foundations of law and justice, which is why they’re extremely detailed, thorough and quite often difficult and arduous to make and read. Once again, many such AI tools are built just for this strenuous work. Legaly and goHeather are technologies that review and draft contracts. They use machine learning to derive key terms, identify risks and ensure conformity with laws. This eradicates the difficult manual task of reviewing contracts, which means lawyers and associates can focus more efficiently to deal with more complicated tasks.
Additionally, AI has found roots in litigation as well. Predictive analytics, powered by machine learning algorithms, can analyze past cases, behavior of judges, and craft potential arguments and their counters of opposing counsel to predict the likely judgment and outcome of a case. This helps attorneys create more effective strategies by providing data driven insights that contribute to the strength of the case and hopefully gain a favorable ruling.
But nothing exists without consequence. AI, since its inception, has been subjected to criticism from companies, workers and the general public itself. Gen Z, which has already started growing rapidly in the workforce, is surprisingly one of the generations most critical of AI, due to their fears of it replacing jobs.
AI raises numerous ethical concerns regarding the legal industry. The dependance on algorithms for decision-making, especially considering that law is a profession that impacts human lives greatly, poses questions about accountability, transparency and bias. These softwares learn from historical data, but that data is not unbiased. The algorithms may replicate the inequalities that have been consistently there throughout the justice system.
While one of the most relieving parts of using AI in legal practice is its erasure of routine, boring tasks, there is rising concern about the future of legal jobs. Supervisors consider the hard, manual work that paralegals and junior lawyers to be necessary, as it contributes to refining their skills as a lawyer and growing through the ranks. It provides needful and meaningful training and development opportunities to new legal professionals, which raises the question of how law firms allowing the usage of AI will handle the efficiency AI brings with these concerns. AI has already made its impact on this world, despite being relatively new. There is no question of its erasure, AI is here to stay. Now, the world must navigate how to go about its use, and what changes must be made to ensure that this technology serves the best interests of justice, fairness and people.
Written by Anushka Sriram
