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The Law and AI

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The risk of misguided confidence

Both examples illustrate a misguided confidence in technology’s ability to accurately analyze or truly understand human activities. As AI quickly moves into legal practices, analyzing long-form narrative content (legal briefs, judgment summaries, etc.), the danger is that this same misguided confidence in the accuracy of AI will prevail. AI is very good, and light years ahead of where it was just a decade ago, but it is far from “intelligent.” Indeed, it is only as good as the data it is provided and needs close human supervision and continuous training to be of use. AI can augment skilled human workers (legal professionals), but it cannot provide actionable guidance and never should be solely relied upon to do so.

AI can do some things well, such as finding clauses, triggers, and potential contradictions in lengthy legal documents. AI can rapidly accelerate the time needed to research past legal cases. AI can find patterns in data that humans may well miss and can undertake a lot of the tedious and typically error-ridden work of document reviews. Yet, in its enthusiastic embrace of AI, the legal profession needs to tread very carefully and ensure that any use of AI includes the application of humans to control it and to exercise creativity, good judgment, compassion, and legal knowledge. Otherwise, things can go south quickly.

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