Artificial Intelligence is increasingly disrupting the litigation world. While it cannot replace the need for attorneys to exercise judgment, it can support data-driven decision making and transform legal research and writing tasks for the better. As a preliminary matter, many practitioners are concerned about AI replacing the need for paralegals, and to a lesser extent, attorneys. In an effort to allay these concerns, proponents of AI suggest it cannot replace the analytical skills and intuition necessitated by the profession. Moreover, the attorney-client relationship, which inarguably requires the human element, plays a critical role in the development and success of a litigation strategy.

Legal professionals are exploring how generative AI can transform tasks such as drafting documents, conducting legal research, and even predicting case outcomes. As technology evolves, attorneys are taking more time to focus on strategic planning while delegating tasks traditionally performed by entry-level colleagues to AI. Legal AI has the power to rapidly sift through volumes of case law and reduce them into a comprehensive summary at a rate that exceeds human capacity, allowing litigators to proceed with confidence knowing they’ve left no stone unturned.

Critical to the case being made by proponents of AI in the legal sphere is the business impact of the technology and the potential for cost savings that could allow professionals to devote more time to high-value tasks. Proponents of AI in the legal profession also emphasize its potential to revolutionize access to justice for litigants with limited resources. Because machine learning expedites the process of due diligence, litigation costs tend to lessen. But with its increasing use in the legal industry, concerns are growing about data privacy and security, ensuring compliance with privacy laws, and protection of sensitive information.

Critics of AI in the legal profession argue that some systems inherit biases from the data from which they are trained. If the training data reflects historical biases or inequalities, AI can perpetuate these biases in its outputs and inadvertently exacerbate existing biases present in the data. This can lead to unfair outcomes, particularly in areas such as sentencing, bail decisions, and hiring practices within law firms. Ensuring AI systems are trained on diverse and representative data sets is crucial to mitigate bias. Because biased AI can lead to unfair legal outcomes, it also has the power to undermine trust in the legal system and lead to legal challenges. To address AI bias, legal professionals are advocating for more transparent AI systems, routine bias audits, and the use of diverse and representative training data. For example, practitioners are advocating for a stronger regulatory framework to safeguard against unfair or unethical implementation of AI systems. However, the “black box” nature of many AI algorithms makes it difficult to understand how decisions are made, resulting in a lack of transparency in a profession where accountability and the ability to explain decisions are paramount. Practitioners must prioritize their duty to provide clear and understandable reasoning for outputs predicated upon AI work product.

Legal professionals are pushing to ensure AI tools do not reinforce existing inequalities and yield incorrect conclusions predicated on deficient, incorrect, or inadequate data. Moreover, lawyers are bound by ethics around competence, due diligence, legal communication, and supervision—and many of these characteristics inform how AI is used. Ethical concerns are particularly paramount in the context of sensitive legal areas such as custody disputes, criminal justice, and divorce settlements, highlighting the critical need to maintain ethical vigilance and commit to ethical integrity. In this way, maintaining the human element is crucial to mitigate biases and guarantee individualized legal opinions and conclusions. AI should not be seen as a threat to the profession, but rather a complement to an inherently human profession. AI should be used to enhance the human element, not replace it. Human oversight is cricual to maintaining integrity in the legal process by preventing over-reliance on automated systems. The ethical considerations surrounding the use of AI in the legal profession are complex and multifaceted. By addressing issues of bias, transparency, privacy, competence, ethical use, and access to justice, the legal community can harness the benefits of AI while upholding the principles of fairness and justice.