Authorized and Unauthorized Practices of Law: The Role of Autonomous Levels of AI Legal Reasoning
This addresses the need for clearer boundaries in legal practice regulations as AI disrupts the profession, though it appears incremental by applying an existing autonomous levels concept to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of defining authorized versus unauthorized legal practices in the context of AI by proposing a framework based on autonomous levels of AI legal reasoning, offering insights to advance debates on legal profession disruptions.
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) that are being applied to legal efforts have raised controversial questions about the existent restrictions imposed on the practice-of-law. Generally, the legal field has sought to define Authorized Practices of Law (APL) versus Unauthorized Practices of Law (UPL), though the boundaries are at times amorphous and some contend capricious and self-serving, rather than being devised holistically for the benefit of society all told. A missing ingredient in these arguments is the realization that impending legal profession disruptions due to AI can be more robustly discerned by examining the matter through the lens of a framework utilizing the autonomous levels of AI Legal Reasoning (AILR). This paper explores a newly derived instrumental grid depicting the key characteristics underlying APL and UPL as they apply to the AILR autonomous levels and offers key insights for the furtherance of these crucial practice-of-law debates.