A.I. in law: Is it here to stay?

For nearly a year now, we here at Douglas Scott Legal Recruitment have followed various developments in artificial intelligence and its use in the legal sector.  

In that time, several prominent law firms have been using this technology as a part of everyday processes and calls for more significant and tighter regulation have grown ever louder. This has lead to the news that Google, creators of one of the biggest AI language models, Gemini, is investing £9.5 million in a law firm that has created an AI paralegal that passed the first part of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam. So, we thought it was worth asking the question – is artificial intelligence in law here to stay?  

As you may remember, towards the end of last year, Lawhive built out an artificial intelligence model (called Lawrence), which was able to score 74% on the SQE1 exam. At the time, there was a lot of comment about Lawrence’s ability to learn and develop, though it did struggle with more complex logic and wider context. Now, Lawhive will have much more scope to develop Lawrence, with Google Ventures, a venture capital arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, investing £9.5 million into the firm. Lawrence is currently being used to deal with the repetitive tasks that lawyers have to perform and some customer interaction services. The firm’s chief executive believes that using tools like Lawrence will help cut costs passed on to clients. Also, one of the UK’s top law judges, Lord Justice Birss, recently said that AI could help democratise the legal service for people previously unrepresented in the justice system.  

Despite this seeming enthusiasm from some sectors of the legal community, others have concerns – even those who believe AI has a place in law, warn against implementing it too much. Briss LJ himself used the same speech at King’s College in London, where he exalted the benefits of artificial intelligence to say that he couldn’t see any scenario where it was replacing human faces in the legal system. He believes trust in the law is a crucial concern, and people may find it difficult to trust a language model programme over a human being. There are also concerns that people without traditional qualifications can come to law without conventional qualifications, which may upset the traditional balance in law. Over three-quarters of respondents to a survey from last year were concerned that this would occur without proper regulation of artificial intelligence. Even though law firms enthusiastically embrace this new technology, some remain concerned about its impact.  

So, artificial intelligence looks like it is here to stay. However, some still have concerns, and the field of AI is still a bit of a wild west regarding laws and regulations. But especially with the promise of money from big tech firms like Google on offer, more law firms will probably be tempted to investigate the possibilities of AI further. These developments will be ones we continue to follow over the next year to see how far AI has an influence on the legal sector.