Promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence for legal applications
This work addresses the problem of overestimating AI capabilities in legal applications for legal professionals and policymakers, highlighting incremental insights into evaluation challenges.
The paper examines AI's potential in legal tasks, finding that tasks promising the most significant changes to the legal profession are hardest to evaluate and prone to overoptimism, and it provides recommendations for better AI evaluation and deployment.
Is AI set to redefine the legal profession? We argue that this claim is not supported by the current evidence. We dive into AI's increasingly prevalent roles in three types of legal tasks: information processing; tasks involving creativity, reasoning, or judgment; and predictions about the future. We find that the ease of evaluating legal applications varies greatly across legal tasks, based on the ease of identifying correct answers and the observability of information relevant to the task at hand. Tasks that would lead to the most significant changes to the legal profession are also the ones most prone to overoptimism about AI capabilities, as they are harder to evaluate. We make recommendations for better evaluation and deployment of AI in legal contexts.