Will AI Writing Replace Lawyers

As perceptions of AI writing start to shift in AI’s favor, some are starting to agree that AI tools can capture a human element into their generations. However, what about when AI text doesn’t require a human feel but rather simply needs to interpret requests into precise legal language?

The future of law is potentially fully automated as artificial intelligence is becoming able to dispense legal advice and document reviews that people would traditionally seek professional legal services for.

Like any industry, legal work is filled with routine tasks that law firms know are going to be replaced by automation. The question is though, will AI writing advancements end up replacing the entire legal profession?

Table of Contents

• AI in The Legal Industry

• AI and Law School

• Conclusion

AI in The Legal Industry

According to Reuters’ 2024 Future of Professionals Report, AI is being used in law for drafting and reviewing documents, legal research, predicting case outcomes, contract analysis, and more. The report finds that AI is boosting productivity to the point that lawyers are generating an average of an extra $100,000 in income based on time saved (about four hours per week).

Both lawyers and clients are wary of how AI will be utilized in legal practice. If you’re hiring a lawyer that discloses they used generative AI to write your contract, would you trust them?

If the AI makes a mistake because its trained on bad datasets, who is to blame? There are numerous legal and ethical considerations to the use of AI legal tools that make replacement of human lawyers a potential disastrous decision.

The major problem with AI in the legal space is trustworthiness of the tools. Legal AI needs to be trained on trusted sources to draft documents that are precise. AI systems then need to be fully transparent on which sources they're trained on. Neither the algorithm nor sources can ever be biased if the tool is to be considered trustworthy.

This coupled with the potential for an AI writers to generate AI hallucinations makes lawyers especially fickle at the proposition of integrating AI.

Perhaps that’s why the 2023 state of legal practice survey concluded that only 14% of respondents were utilizing AI and even that small group were only using it to draft client communications and some legal research.

Even though advancements in legal AI systems can streamline a firm's workflow, they could potentially undermine client relationships. New technology may change the practice of law, but what attracts people to lawyers is trust in their human qualities like experience and decision-making.

AI and Law School

ChatGPT’s machine learning comes from such a huge swath of unchecked datasets, it shouldn’t be trusted for legal advice. In the case of drafting papers for law school, traditional chatbots are ill equipped to answer the needs law students have.

Generative AI systems that allow students to create humanized text though, at least include features that can summarize large documents or humanize jargonistic AI writing to be usable in academics.

Still, because using AI writing tools as a ghostwriter is often considered a form of plagiarism, law schools can carry incredible severe consequences for discovering the presence of AI in any papers submitted.

Beyond summarizing legal documents and formatting citations, for actual legal research, professionals and students should only seek AI technology specifically trained on the right sources. As far studying for the bar exam, AI study tools are a wonderful way to improve a student’s habits.

Conclusion

AI will continue to evolve and integrate into the legal landscape. The current state of AI-powered tools may threaten the current hourly business model for lawyers, but as far as replacing their jobs entirely, until the machine learning is more transparent and unbiased, then lawyers can sit comfortably knowing new legal tech is mostly there to help them communicate to clients and make their research less time consuming.

As with most AI tools, they are meant to be used in conjunction with humans until they advance far enough to recreate human judgement and feel. If an algorithm ever becomes powerful enough to do that, one should expect the entire practice of law (and world) to be revolutionized into something so easy and painless, that lawyers may prefer to be out of work.