AI in Legal Research: 8 Real Ways AI Can Impact Your Practice
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the overarching description for technology that uses computers and software to create intelligent, humanlike behaviors. With the recent rapid AI advancements, many legal professionals are feeling the pressure to leverage AI for legal research to deliver legal services faster and more efficiently. More importantly, clients have come to expect it from the law firms they employ. But what’s the real impact of using AI in legal research? How will lawyers be affected by this new technology, and what does it mean for their day-to-day legal practice?
The positive impacts of using AI for legal research
When used appropriately and ethically, AI for legal professionals can improve productivity and help uncover deeper insights. The unmatched speed of AI technology can help legal professionals prepare better and faster than ever before, with added efficiencies, more streamlined workflows, better training and education, elevated profits, and greater client satisfaction.
1. Faster, more comprehensive case law research
For legal researchers, AI means they’re able to carry out legal research more efficiently by sifting through legal documents in seconds instead of the hours or days that a manual review would take. Machine learning is the technology by which computers use algorithms to analyze datasets, find patterns, and predict outcomes. The best AI tools for lawyers use these machine learning capabilities to automate tedious research tasks such as searching case law, checking citations, and identifying additional relevant content.
By quickly analyzing massive amounts of data, legal AI tools can help researchers narrow in on the most important sources, and even avoid missing relevant documents. Instead of spending time reviewing individual cases that may prove irrelevant, legal researchers can use AI to orient themselves to the area of law and key issues and thereby more easily find the leading case law, guiding legal principles, and best language to support their argument.
2. Data-driven litigation strategies
The rapid development and widespread availability of AI have led some legal experts to predict that a lawyer’s failure to understand and use AI could soon be considered a lack of competent representation. In fact, the American Bar Association’s competence rule states that a lawyer should provide competent representation to their client, including that “a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.”
AI can be a powerful tool to help lawyers fulfill their duty to their clients by enabling better-informed decisions to optimize their litigation strategy. AI can search millions of data points by company, law firm, attorney, court, and judge and turn them into meaningful insights that enable you to:
- Visualize trends
- Predict case outcomes
- Anticipate opposing counsel arguments and tactics
3. More productive legal teams
Attorneys are often expected to start practicing and advising clients as soon as possible, without losing valuable time on training, research, and administrative or operational tasks. This can easily lead to legal teams feeling overworked and burned out.
Legal AI tools can support a law firm’s bottom line by providing the information and resources attorneys need to be more productive and efficient. For example, AI can help them understand a legal question, manage the research from beginning to end, and advise clients quickly – all while making the whole process look effortless to clients.
4. New business opportunities
AI technology fuels business development by:
- Building deeper relationships with existing clients
- More effectively identifying client opportunities
- Crafting stronger pitches for both existing and prospective clients
Access to AI-powered search and analytics can help legal professionals pinpoint areas of business interest and quickly gain a deeper understanding of the trends and challenges impacting their clients. Examples include:
- Possible regulatory investigations
- Sales or mergers
- Bankruptcies
- Rumors
- Negative news
- Pending litigation
The ability to deliver meaningful legal advice that’s grounded in practical business realities and effectively anticipates issues on the horizon is one of the most significant ways a law firm can distinguish itself from its competitors, elevating a firm to a company’s trusted, go-to legal advisor.
5. Actionable client and market insights
Today’s businesses demand more of their legal counsel: they expect a deep understanding of the marketplace in which they operate that supports contextual legal advice specifically tailored to the needs of that individual client. In today’s legal landscape, the worry of not finding all relevant legal materials can be exacerbated by the seemingly endless stream of information, including:
- Agency materials
- Statutes
- Regulations
- Books
- Practice guides
- Law reviews
- Legal white papers
- News
AI can help legal professionals gather large sets of information and extract market insights from the information that matters most, which in turn enables them to be more strategic and offer greater value to clients. By using AI technology to enhance their research capabilities, attorneys can be better positioned to provide legal advice that’s correct, contextualized, business-focused, and valuable. This can be a game changer, especially because corporate clients value legal counsel that can get up to speed on the company’s business on the firm’s own time and own dime.
Can AI-generated research have a negative impact?
As generative AI technology continues to evolve and both its applications and limitations become better understood, legal professionals need to be aware of the legal issues and potential disadvantages that could come with using AI for legal research.
It’s also important to remember that these groundbreaking digital research and analytical tools should be seen as enhancing the legal research experience – and should not take the place of an attorney’s review, analysis, and judgment.
6. Hallucinations and inaccuracies can undermine a legal argument
In its current iteration, generative AI technology is known to sometimes produce hallucinations within its responses. This is the phenomenon by which AI chatbots may confidently provide false information in response to a prompt – such as citing a nonexistent case in a legal brief.
In a field that requires accuracy, AI-generated factual inaccuracies can be serious risks for legal professionals. That’s why it remains important that lawyers use their human judgment and professional expertise to review and confirm the quality and accuracy of any data provided by an AI tool.
7. Fair use questions surround training AI on copyrighted material
In general, there is currently no legal fair use case that addresses the abundance of information consumed by the large language models that generative AI tools are trained on. Any legal decision on this question will have far-reaching consequences for a wide range of industries – either crippling the advancement of generative AI or diminishing the exclusivity of copyright.
8. Third-party AI tools may compromise client confidentiality
The ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct requires lawyers to take reasonable steps to protect client information from unintended recipients. It’s critical for legal professionals to check the terms of use for any AI application they use and understand how any information they input into the tool is stored or shared with third parties.
Here also, the rules on outsourcing can come into play, since most AI tools that lawyers are currently using are developed and operated by external vendors. It’s important to know the rules for your institution. As a best practice, a librarian at your firm or organization can offer training before you get started and answer any related questions.
Enable smarter workflows with Bloomberg Law’s AI-powered research tools
Recent machine learning breakthroughs and the growing prevalence of generative AI platforms will continue to significantly impact how legal professionals use AI for legal research.
Download our report on AI and the Legal Profession to explore the most compelling challenges generative AI will bring to legal professionals, plus the hot topics our analysts are watching.
Bloomberg Law has been perfecting the power of AI to help legal professionals speed up and simplify research tasks for more than a decade. The recent generative AI advancements mean our AI-driven legal research tools can do even more to help lawyers work smarter:
- Smart Code, a virtual annotated legal code, applies machine learning to interpret state and federal legal codes, rules, and regulations to quickly identify the strongest and most useful case extracts.
- Points of Law helps attorneys quickly pinpoint the best case for a particular point of law so you can efficiently identify precedents that strengthen your case.
- Docket Key helps attorneys find the one on-point brief, sample motion, precedent, or other form they need among millions of documents.
- Brief Analyzer automates the tedious, time-consuming process of reviewing legal documents, checking citations, and preparing a credible response.
Request a demo to see how Bloomberg Law delivers the tools to streamline your legal research and help you get the answers you need – fast.