It Cannot Be Right If It Was Written by AI: On Lawyers' Preferences of Documents Perceived as Authored by an LLM vs a Human
This addresses the critical issue of how legal professionals' perceptions might affect the adoption and consequences of AI-generated legal documents, which is important for responsible implementation in the legal domain.
The study investigated lawyers' and law students' perceptions of legal documents based on whether they believed the documents were human-crafted or AI-generated, finding a clear preference for documents perceived as human-authored despite most participants expecting automated document generation in the future.
Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a future in which certain types of legal documents may be generated automatically. This has a great potential to streamline legal processes, lower the cost of legal services, and dramatically increase access to justice. While many researchers focus on proposing and evaluating LLM-based applications supporting tasks in the legal domain, there is a notable lack of investigations into how legal professionals perceive content if they believe an LLM has generated it. Yet, this is a critical point as over-reliance or unfounded scepticism may influence whether such documents bring about appropriate legal consequences. This study is the necessary analysis of the ongoing transition towards mature generative AI systems. Specifically, we examined whether the perception of legal documents' by lawyers and law students (n=75) varies based on their assumed origin (human-crafted vs AI-generated). The participants evaluated the documents, focusing on their correctness and language quality. Our analysis revealed a clear preference for documents perceived as crafted by a human over those believed to be generated by AI. At the same time, most participants expect the future in which documents will be generated automatically. These findings could be leveraged by legal practitioners, policymakers, and legislators to implement and adopt legal document generation technology responsibly and to fuel the necessary discussions on how legal processes should be updated to reflect recent technological developments.