What Is AI in Law?

Key takeaways

Artificial intelligence (AI) in law refers to the emergence of machine learning and generative AI applications in the legal field. 

• AI in law can increase lawyer productivity by eliminating mundane tasks, allowing lawyers to focus more on legal analysis.

• Many generative AI (GenAI) chatbots, even those specially designed for legal purposes, require fact-checking [1]. 

• You can use AI in law to summarize contracts, assist in legal research, and draft proposal outlines. 

Learn more about AI in law, who uses it, some opportunities it opens up, and some of the ongoing challenges it faces. If you're ready to start building in-demand AI skills, enroll in the Google AI Essentials Specialization, where you can explore how to use AI responsibly, find out how to avoid its biases, and apply basic prompting techniques to get the responses you want. 

What is AI in law?

Artificial intelligence (AI) in law is the use of machine learning algorithms to assist in routine legal tasks. The use of AI in the legal profession can potentially increase lawyer productivity for information retrieval, task automation, and improved client services, while also allowing lawyers to dedicate their time to strategic and critical thinking on their cases. 

While AI in law has the potential to help lawyers, many AI chatbots, such as GPT-4 and those trained specifically for law applications, may hallucinate responses. This means they either generate incorrect responses or generate a correct response but reference a contradictory citation. A 2025 study from Stanford University found that GPT-4 hallucinated 43 percent of its responses to open-ended legal questions [1].

The AI landscape in law: Core technologies and their applications

Some types of AI used in the legal field include technology-assisted review (TAR), machine learning algorithms, and GenAI. Some ways the legal field uses, or plans to use, these types of AI include:

• Technology-assisted review (TAR): This algorithm allows lawyers to assess large volumes of data related to their case and summarize legal principles much faster than before. 

• Machine learning: Machine learning algorithms designed for legal applications can find relevant case law in seconds. 

• Generative AI: GenAI can assist in the drafting of legal documents such as contracts, legal memorandums, and proposal request replies. 

Many legal chatbots and machine learning algorithms use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). These systems first attempt to retrieve the source material relevant to the user query and then generate a more accurate response back to the user. 

Legal artificial intelligence uses

According to a survey from Bloomberg Law, the top six ways lawyers use AI include [2]:

1. General legal research: 40 percent

2. Drafting communications: 25 percent

3. Summarizing legal narratives: 23 percent

4. Reviewing legal documents: 19 percent

5. Drafting/templating legal contracts: 13 percent

6. Reviewing discovery: 11 percent

The majority of respondents declared they use GenAI for legal research, with these tools creating summaries of many large legal documents that can provide citations and link to supporting authorities in the documents. These tools differ from older legal research tools based on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms that speed up the legal database search process by narrowing down searches. 

Who uses AI in the legal industry?

The use of AI in the legal industry impacts many different roles, as lawyers, judges, educators, and governments must understand what using AI in law means. Some key positions that use or must understand AI in the legal industry include:

• Lawyers: Lawyers can use AI to assist them in research, daily communications, and drafting, but must also understand the ethical implications of using AI and ensure its correctness. 

• Paralegals: Paralegals use AI to assist in their tasks of document generation, allowing them to focus more specifically on analysis and case management. They can also ensure that outputs from GenAI are trustworthy for the lawyer they’re under. 

• Judges: Judges need to understand how AI works, how lawyers use it, whether lawyers substantiate the facts, and whether or not they want to admit its usage in their courtrooms. 

• Law professors: Professors must understand the nature of AI use in the field of law, ongoing cases of its use, and where its use may or may not be helpful or ethical for lawyers. They can demonstrate these findings to students by developing courses surrounding the topic. 

Is there any AI for law?

Yes, lawyers can use specifically designed GenAI tools for law. While it is possible to use a public tool like ChatGPT, AI hallucinations are much more prevalent since ChatGPT is trained for general use [1]. Some law-domain-specific AI tools include:

• CoCounsel Legal from Thomson Reuters

• Lexis+ AI from LexisNexis (RELX)

• Harvey from HarveyAI

Benefits of using AI in law

Many of the benefits of using AI in law come down to productivity, efficiency, and saving lawyers time to focus on the most important part of their work: legal analysis and client relationships. Some of the outlined benefits include:

• Reducing the amount of time you spend on case law research, judge opinions, pleading, motions, and briefs so that you can spend that time analyzing your cases. 

• With your time not spent digging through research, your law firm can explore new revenue models like fixed pricing as opposed to the billable hour model, so that clients can see steadier prices. 

• AI tools can improve the workflow of law firms by creating case methodologies and ushering in consistent legal project management. 

• AI can aid you in e-discovery, the process of combing through evidence documents to put together a case by finding patterns and anomalies as well as making research suggestions. 

Navigating the challenges of using AI in law: Ethical, regulatory, and security considerations

While AI in law presents opportunities, it also raises many legal, ethical, and operational challenges. One of the most frequently cited challenges is in the trustworthiness of citations and the necessity for human fact-checking. For example, in a case against Walmart, a federal judge nearly sanctioned plaintiff lawyers Rudwin Ayala, T. Michael Morgan, and Taly Goody after finding that their internal AI platform hallucinated nine of the cases in a court document [3]. 

Some other challenges of AI in law include:

• Threat to the industry-standard billable hour model as you spend less time researching than before, leading to fewer hours billed to individual clients (although this could allow your law firm to take on more clients). 

• If you use GenAI, you are the one responsible for using its output in the court of law and must follow the same American Bar Association (ABA) ethical principles as you would with any nonlawyer’s (paralegal or legal assistant) work. 

• Practicing lawyers, law students, and law professors all must learn about the AI tools available, how they work, the ethical concerns surrounding them, and how to implement them into their work, which may require additional training. 

• Factual inaccuracies and incomplete answers still plague AI models like ChatGPT, and even the models from Lexis and Thomas Reuters still have hallucination rates of 17 percent and 33 percent, respectively [1]. This means lawyers using GenAI have to spend additional time fact-checking work. 

• The usage of AI tools must meet lawyer confidentiality requirements so that client data doesn’t leak outside the firm’s data networks. Another data privacy concern arises with the usage of public AI platforms (like ChatGPT), which uses the data you put into them to further train their algorithms, potentially breaching client confidentiality. 

Will lawyers survive AI?

Yes, lawyers and the legal profession will survive the development of AI in law. While AI can help you automate repetitive tasks, assist in research, and create contract drafts, as a lawyer, you still need to build client relationships, think critically about your cases, and lead in the courtroom and beyond. 

How to get started with AI in law

If you are a lawyer and want to get started with AI in law, you can begin by pursuing Continuing Legal Education courses that focus on AI and law. This is also useful because the American Bar Association (ABA) encourages practicing lawyers to understand AI technology in law, regardless of whether you want to use it. The ABA also releases ethical conduct principles for lawyers' use of GenAI to help guide you through the growing field. 

If you are a current law student, many professors around the US have already begun implementing AI lessons into the classroom to help prepare students for what they may encounter in the field. These courses encompass AI ethics, how to use legal technology, and how to ensure data privacy. Some schools have centers and curricula designed around AI, while others may have courses to teach students how to use AI law technology ethically. 

Explore our free AI resources for legal professionals

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