WRIT 340 WP3
Part I-Law Web Magazine Article
AI: A Threat to Lawyers or Simply Another Legal Tool?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a popular topic of discussion within the last few years. Its increasing use in our everyday lives has got people asking: will AI take our jobs? As an undergraduate student hoping to pursue a career in law, I have also worried about whether the professional life I am rigorously preparing for will soon be dominated by machines. The use of AI in the legal field is not only concerning for law students like me but also for the general public who will interact with the legal system in some way during their lives. These concerns prompted me to research AI’s current capabilities and their impact on the legal profession.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
According to the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP) Business School, AI constitutes any machine-based system that has the “ability to interpret external data correctly, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.” This means that everyday things such as smartphone facial recognition, smart applications like Siri and Alexa, and content-generating programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are all AI. The types of AI relevant to the legal world are machine learning and generative AI.
Machine Learning and Generative AI: Strengths and Weaknesses
Machine learning artificial intelligence uses algorithms to “find patterns in massive amounts of data and then [...] make predictions.” This type of AI has become commonplace in large law firms, as it is used for document drafting and review, as well as completing forms, making more time available for lawyers to do more complex tasks. These capabilities of machine learning also threaten the number of introductory positions in the field, as most new associates at law firms perform these kinds of activities. However, the most valuable ability of machine learning is case prediction. By surveying thousands of judicial decisions relevant to a case, machine learning can provide lawyers with knowledgeable predictions of outcomes of litigation strategies. No matter how experienced and well-versed a human lawyer may be, they cannot survey the same amount of relevant case outcomes as machine learning tools. These abilities make machine learning a vital component of the legal profession and its future.
The other relevant type of artificial intelligence is generative AI, which uses machine learning and large volumes of data to generate new content, such as texts, images, and music. Well-known generative AI systems include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, IBM’s Watson, and LexisNexis’s Lexis+ AI legal assistant. Although generative AI can efficiently draft and summarize texts, it has significant limitations. One of the concerns regarding its use is the phenomenon of “hallucinating,” in which the program generates false information. Because systems like ChatGPT survey data taken from the internet, the content they generate can reflect misinformation and prevalent biases.
Another weakness of generative AI is its argumentative ability. Even though these systems can “recognize and process language, [they] cannot understand it,” unlike lawyers who have spent years developing their writing and semantic skills. In a recent study, a group of linguistic scholars gave ChatGPT a prompt to respond to, and of the eight arguments it generated, at least four demonstrated obvious fallacies such as circular reasoning and appeals to authority. But even the responses that were free of logical fallacies were not persuasive and would not stand up to scrutiny. For this reason, the public will still need human lawyers for their oratorical skills and the creation of persuasive arguments.
Lessons from Aristotle: Why AI Cannot Replace All Lawyers
In Aristotle’s treatise On Rhetoric, he outlines three modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos refers to the character and credibility of the speaker, pathos refers to the emotion of the audience induced by the speech, and logos refers to the logical argument that the orator presents (1.2.2-6). For Aristotle, a successful speaker employs these three appeals to make an audience well-disposed to their point of view or desired judgment. Because AI is a machine, it cannot provide strong ethos or pathos appeals in the courtroom.
Even if future AI is able to develop intelligent and cogent arguments (logos), the general public will not view it as a credible source or speaker (ethos), especially in a courtroom, and for good reason. In a recent Pew Research poll, 52% of American respondents said they were more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence. Only 10% of respondents said they were more excited than concerned. Given the aforementioned tendency of generative AI systems to “hallucinate,” as well as the occasional flaws and malfunctions that accompany all technology, it would be irrational and irresponsible to entrust AI with a serious task like legal representation. Secondly, Aristotle’s notion of pathos involves making the audience feel friendly and sympathetic to the speaker’s position, but AI cannot convey the necessary passion or sense of closeness and familiarity that a human orator can because it is a computer program. Emotional appeals also depend on human components like personal anecdotes that the audience will relate to. Even if AI repeats a set of anecdotes it has learned from data on the internet, this appeal will be cold and inauthentic because it is a machine, not a human who could have had an experience relatable to the audience.
Another reason AI will not replace human lawyers is that it cannot engage in complex speech delivery. When persuading an audience, a good orator will use gestures, speak in a commanding voice, demonstrate confident and enthusiastic body language, and employ vocal variations in pitch and rate of speech. Being a computer program, generative AI does not have the capability for such rhetorical presentation.
Conclusion
The use of AI in the legal profession has radically changed the role and function of lawyers, allowing for more efficiency in tasks like document analysis and drafting, as well as litigation strategy preparation and prediction. As a result, the number of positions at law firms will significantly lessen, but this does not mean that lawyers will become obsolete. AI technology lacks rhetorical ability and cannot engage in cogent argumentation like human lawyers. This means that in the future, a lawyer’s oratorical and persuasive skills will become more valuable, making the profession more competitive. Although this can be somewhat concerning for law students like me, we should not fear or reject AI but rather view this situation as a wake-up call to improve our rhetorical skills, helping us become better lawyers.
Works Cited
Alarie, Benjamin, et al. “How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect The Practice Of Law.” The University of Toronto Law Journal, vol. 68, no. 1, 2018, pp. 106–24, https://doi.org/10.3138/utlj.2017-0052.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: a Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2007.
Connell, William J. “Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Profession: What You Might Want to Know.” Computer and Internet Lawyer, vol. 35, no. 9, 2018, pp. 32–36.
Ergen, Mustafa. “What Is Artificial Intelligence? Technical Considerations and Future Perception.” Anatolian Journal of Cardiology, vol. 22, no. Suppl 2, 2019, pp. 5–7, https://doi.org/10.14744/AnatolJCardiol.2019.79091.
Haenlein, Michael, and Andreas Kaplan. “A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: On the Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence.” California Management Review, vol. 61, no. 4, 2019, pp. 5–14, https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125619864925.
Harris, Laurie A. Generative Artificial Intelligence: Overview, Issues, and Questions for Congress. Congressional Research Service, 2023. Report IF12426.
Hinton, Martin, and Jean H. M. Wagemans. “How Persuasive Is AI-Generated Argumentation? An Analysis of the Quality of an Argumentative Text Produced by the GPT-3 AI Text Generator.” Argument & Computation, vol. 14, no. 1, 2023, pp. 59– 74, https://doi.org/10.3233/AAC-210026.
“Lexis + AI.” LexisNexis, www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-plus-ai.page. Accessed 30 Oct. 2023.
Rowe, Niamh. “An AI Lawyer Is About to Defend a Human in a U.S. Courtroom.” The Daily Beast, 14 Jan. 2023, www.thedailybeast.com/ai-lawyers-from-donotpay-will- defend-human-defendants-in-traffic-court.
Tyson, Alec, and Emma Kikuchi. “Growing Public Concern About the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Daily Life.” Pew Research Center, 28 Aug. 2023, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/growing-public-concern-about-the- role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-daily-life/.
Part II-Reflection
My topic for this writing assignment is artificial intelligence and the legal profession. I chose to write using the online magazine article genre, drawing inspiration from law magazines I have read. The main conventions of this genre are shorter paragraphs (sometimes even three to four sentences), sections divided by subheadings, and, depending on the topic, refraining from using the first-person perspective. In addition, these articles are usually addressed to specialized audiences like car enthusiasts, cinephiles, or even lawyers. Articles published on specialized magazine sites are usually informative rather than argumentative, especially those geared toward audiences interested in law.
Initially, I debated whether to write a scholarly article or an op-ed, but I found that the online magazine article provided an intermediate path between the two. I did not want this work to be unnecessarily academic, but at the same time, I wanted it to be geared toward a specific audience, namely law students like me. For this reason, I did not choose to write in the op-ed style, as those articles are usually intended for a more general audience. Writing in the online magazine article genre allowed me to report on AI’s capabilities, its application in the legal world, and my evaluation of the matter, without the professional jargon that typically accompanies scholarly publications.
When writing my online magazine article, I chose to abide by most of the genre conventions, making slight deviations where I deemed fit. After a brief introductory paragraph, I divided the text into four subtitled sections. This provides structure to the work, making it easier for the reader to follow the progression of ideas. The subtitles also give the reader a sense of what to expect when engaging with the article. Following the conventions of the genre, I also chose to write shorter paragraphs than I typically would, some of which were as short as three to four sentences. I appreciate this formatting convention because it provides clarity for the reader, helping them comprehend the presented information bit by bit. In accordance with the genre, significant sections of my article are informational, but I also included my opinions throughout. Although the law magazine articles I encountered refrained from inserting the first-person perspective, I did use it, but only in the introductory and concluding passages. The purpose of this was to make the work more relatable to my intended audience.
I wrote my law magazine article primarily as an informational piece for students preparing for a career in law like me. I chose to write about artificial intelligence and the legal profession because it is a timely topic of concern for many law students. Throughout the past three years, I have often wondered whether the increased use of AI for legal tasks will eventually replace most, if not all, lawyers. I have also had conversations with some of my peers and professors in which they voiced similar concerns. However, I was disappointed that I never encountered an article or informational piece that addressed this issue from the perspective of a law student. For this reason, I wanted to write an article that would explain the capabilities of AI, how lawyers are using this technology, and answer whether or not law students should worry about future job prospects. In other words, I tried to prepare a work that I, as a law student, would want to read for information and insight.
In the piece, I concluded that lawyers will not become obsolete because AI cannot effectively argue or persuade like a trained professional, making these skills more valuable. Even so, due to AI's efficiency in tasks like legal research and document analysis, I predict that the field will become more competitive and the number of introductory job positions will decrease. In my concluding remarks I addressed fellow law students for the final time, trying to show them that this situation should encourage them to develop their argumentation and speaking skills.