'Human Law, Human Lawyers and the Emerging AI Faith' by Giulia Gentile in (2024) LSE Public Policy Review comments
The advent of AI has generated remarkable interest in the legal sector. A new ‘faith’ in the transformative power of AI has emerged among law practitioners. According to this new religion, AI would significantly improve the law and the legal profession thanks to automation and the ensuing gains. This development has a messianic taste insofar as it would support lawyers to deal with increasingly complex legal frameworks and a rising demand of legal services. Should lawyers embrace this new faith and allow themselves to be guided by the algorithmic power in the development of their practise? As for all new faiths emerging in times of crisis, this paper argues, caution is needed. The implications of the AI religion in the legal sector are far-reaching and shake the very understanding of human law and human lawyers. A critical perspective should be embraced by individual operators, firms and regulators when reflecting on the potential of AI for the legal sector.
The law and legal professionals are currently experiencing a profound rethinking entailed by the advancement of legal artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven automation (DDA). As history teaches us, in moments of crisis new gods and religions surface (1). Likewise, a novel faith in the transformative force of AI has emerged among legal professionals (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). These developments (AI and DDA) are creating new narratives and beliefs in the power of technology and its impact on law and the legal profession.
With the emergence of AI systems, so has come the expectation that they may transform the law and the legal profession. AI and DDA are still developing, yet the hype among laywers is high, and not completely unfounded. AI and data-driven automation are both quantitatively and qualitatively noteworthy. Numerous scholars and professionals (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) argue that it is just a matter of time until the technology overtakes the legal profession. Now that AI has come, nothing will be the same for the law and lawyers. AI and DDA are mushrooming, beginning to colonise all aspects of the legal world, but there are real concerns about the quality of these tools. A telling example involves a US lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft briefs for a case. The judge hearing the case later discovered that the briefs included citations that did not exist and that had been forged by ChatGPT (7).
It is evident that, while AI may be transformative, we must be cautious. The promised new land of artificial law and artificial lawyers may not be as proximate (or as promising) as one might think. Currently, the legal sector is floating somewhere between tradition and automation.
This offers us the opportunity to go back to first principles. What distinguishes human law and human lawyers from AI law and AI lawyers? What does AI promise to bring to the legal sector and what may it take away? Reflecting on these issues is crucial to ensure the adequacy of prospective public policy developments on the development of the legal sector, and to ensure that we avoid lapsing into uncritical acceptance of the novel faith in AI.
This paper explores these questions and provides reflections on the future of the law and lawyers in the AI era. It firstly illustrates the main scholarly theories about human law and human lawyers, before exploring recent developments in the legal sector of the 21st century. It closes with remarks on the implications of the novel AI religion for human law and human lawyers.
