Lawyers’ Perceptions on the Use of AI

Abstract

This chapter examines lawyers’ perceptions on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their legal work. A meta-synthesis of published large-scale surveys of the legal profession completed in 2019 and 2020 in several leading jurisdictions, e.g., the UK, US, and EU, reveals some dissonance between hype and reality. While some lawyers see the potential contribution that AI and machine-learning (ML) driven legal tech innovation can make to transform aspects of legal practice, others have little awareness of the existence of the same. While there appears to be first mover advantage for some legal practitioners to incorporate innovative AI and ML based legal tech tools into their developing business model, there are few metrics that exist that can help legal teams evaluate whether such legal tech tools provide a sustainable competitive advantage to their legal work. A non-representative expert sampling of UK-based non-lawyer legal tech professionals whose work focuses on the utilisation of AI and ML based legal tech tools in different legal practice environments confirms the findings derived from the meta-synthesis. This expert sampling was also evaluated against published peer-reviewed research featuring semi-structured interviews of UK lawyer and non-lawyer legal tech professionals on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI and ML for the legal profession. Further research in the form of undertaking a qualitative survey of non-lawyer legal tech professionals with follow-on semi-structured interviews is proposed.