The use of artificial intelligence in the legal profession might generate more civil lawsuits, but it also has the ability to help potential defendants reduce their exposure to expensive litigation, according to West Virginia University law professors.
“I don’t think that AI right now is going to replace lawyers, but lawyers who can’t use AI will get replaced,” Sean Tu, one of the university’s law professors, told The West Virginia Record.
And one of Tu’s associates, law lecturer Amy Cyphert, indicated that AI has the potential to reduce legal costs through tasks such as creating drafts of legal documents.
“There is … potential promise in the use of AI tools like ChatGPT to help lawyers reduce costs by drafting motions and other legal documents more quickly,” Cyphert said in a statement. “Lawyers use artificial intelligence for things like electronic discovery and for determining what electronically stored information might be discoverable in a civil case.”
But there are downsides as well, according to Tu. One attorney attempted to write a legal brief using AI but failed to check the underlying facts adequately prior to filing it.
“What happened was AI started making up cases to support his theory,” Tu said, adding that the attorney was slapped with some fines over the incident.
Tu also expresses caution about potential uses of AI by judges. “How is this going to help judges?” he said. “Are they going to become more consistent in their opinions? The answer is yes. Do I think this is good? No. Why? Because the law changes and evolves with our values.”
Though Tu said AI may be good at handling lower-level legal activities such as filling out forms, anything that involves legal thought and applying legal doctrines to cases needs to have a human at the helm.
But if AI succeeds in significantly reducing legal transaction costs overall, this could lead to more filings as attorneys become more efficient and productive, he said.
On the defense side, though, AI can help those involved in creative pursuits to be less susceptible to plaintiffs’ lawsuits, according to Tu. He pointed to the area of music copyright litigation, noting that AI can be used to compare new songs to a database of previously recorded music to flag them for possible copyright issues and allow artists to make changes to avoid potential litigation.
“Artificial intelligence has evolved to the point where it can be used as a tool to resolve many of the current issues associated with the ‘substantial similarity’ test (for copyright infringement in music),” a summary of a research paper authored by Tu states. “Specifically, courts would no longer have to rely on a battle of the experts or the use of lay observers to determine if a work is substantially similar to another work.”
AI can provide similar legal guardrails in the area of patent filings and help creative individuals to develop detailed specifications about their new inventions, according to Tu.