AI in Law

Legal work requires competent judgment, confidentiality, accurate citations, and responsibility to clients and tribunals. A generated legal paragraph is a draft that needs verification, not an authority.

Key takeaways

• Define jurisdiction and task scope.
• Protect client information.
• Verify every authority and retain human legal responsibility.

Define the task and legal jurisdiction. Finding potentially relevant cases, summarizing a supplied record, and giving advice to a client have different risk profiles. Check the date and status of every authority and distinguish quoted text from generated language. Protect confidential and privileged information. Understand where prompts, documents, embeddings, and outputs are processed and retained. A tool’s general privacy statement may not answer the professional obligations of a specific matter. Use the least data and access needed for the task. The ABA’s Formal Opinion 512 emphasizes competence, confidentiality, communication, supervision, candor, and reasonable fees when lawyers use generative AI. Apply those duties to the actual workflow and jurisdiction. Automated research should preserve links and passages so a lawyer can inspect the basis of a conclusion. Keep a human attorney responsible for filings, advice, and communications. Test for invented authorities, omitted qualifications, and incorrect procedural dates before relying on any output.

1. Imagine a draft cites a case with a convincing title and quotation.
2. Search the official court or legal database and verify the case, passage, date, and jurisdiction.
3. If it cannot be found, remove the citation and investigate the underlying proposition independently.

The constructed review treats a citation as evidence that must exist, not as decoration.