As the use of generative-AI based products becomes more common in the legal sector, it raises substantial ethical questions that must be addressed to maintain the integrity of legal practices. While innovative technologies can provide powerful new capabilities, they don't come without risks - particularly regarding issues of bias, transparency, and accountability. When building in legal tech, we cannot let these ethical minefields go unaddressed and should ensure that there's a clear plan for how we integrate AI into legal workflows.
Understanding the Ethical Concerns in AI-Powered Legal Research
Over the past year, a number of concerns have been raised around legal AI tools, including but not limited to:
- Bias and Fairness: AI systems can perpetuate and amplify existing biases if they're trained on particular data sets. In law, this could potentially skew justice against marginalized communities, especially if AI technology can inadvertently 'echo' engrained prejudices within the legal system.
- Transparency: The perceived "black box" nature of some AI chatbots makes it difficult to understand how decisions are made, complicating accountability especially in a field like law where a clear 'chain of trust' is necessary for most decisions.
- Accountability: When AI tools make errors, determining liability between software developers, users, and possibly the AI itself becomes complex.
Addressing these concerns is critical not only for ethical compliance but also for fostering trust among legal professionals and providers of legal-specific AI technology.
The Ethical Protocols Guiding AI Legal Research at Habeas
To mitigate these ethical risks, we have established comprehensive protocols to ensure a guiding attitude of fairness, transparency, and observability.
Enhanced Transparency of Information
Transparency is crucial for trust and accountability, particularly in legal AI applications. Habeas addresses this through several intentional design decisions:
- Explainable AI: At Habeas, we believe it’s crucial that lawyers can trace why and how a model came to a particular conclusion. Habeas provides detailed explanations for its research findings, outlining the logical pathways and data sources used to arrive at particular conclusions. All models and AI behaviour is 'agentic' (which in simple terms means that traceability and observability of information used, as well as different reasoning steps our models use are much easier to track).
- Detailed Sources / Citations: Since the outset, Habeas has been designed with the principles of observability and trust in mind. We know that lawyers care deeply not just about getting an answer, but also why a particular answer is true. To this end, lawyers can use the interactive user interface of Habeas to see the exact source material being referenced at any time.
- User Control and Customization: By allowing users to build custom agents and modify search parameters, Habeas gives lawyers a significant degree of autonomy that they simply don’t get with other AI Apps like ChatGPT. This user control is a crucial element in ethical AI design, ensuring that the technology serves the user’s specific needs without overstepping,
Clear Accountability Frameworks
- Defined Roles and Responsibilities: At Habeas, our terms of agreement clearly outline the responsibilities of all parties involved. We expect that Habeas is used with the oversight of lawyers, and we ensure lawyers understand that they are still responsible for how the research findings of Habeas are translated into actionable advice for clients
- Legal Compliance: Habeas is designed to comply with existing legal standards and is regularly updated to adapt emerging guidnes and regulations in the AI space, thus maintaining legal and ethical integrity. For example, the Supreme Court of Victoria has recently published guidelines for litigants on responsible AI usage.
- Ongoing Monitoring and Updates: We continuously monitor any updates to AI models and regulations, so that we’re on top of emerging ethical issues and can adapt to changing legal standards.
- If Habeas is uncertain, it will flag this to the user: The product has been designed with clear guardrails in place, and if Habeas doesn’t have accurate information to inform an answer or doesn’t understand the question a lawyer is asking, it will convey this in the response provided to the lawyer.
The Positive Benefits of AI in Legal Practice
Beyond addressing ethical concerns, it should be emphasised that AI tools like Habeas bring numerous long-term benefits that can revitalize legal practices. We should always realise that 'risk' is inherent to the realm of possibility, and whilst there's quite a lot of fear around AI 'taking our jobs', it's better to build responsible, practical software that reduces the cognitive load lawyers struggle with on a daily basis.
Making Law More Human by Reducing the prevlance of 'Robotic' Tasks:
By automating routine and repetitive tasks (such as trawling through document databases), Habeas allows legal professionals to focus on more complex, nuanced aspects of law that require human empathy, deep reading and ethical judgment. This shift not only increases efficiency but also enhances time spent on the most human element of legal practice. At Habeas, our key goal is to automate the mundane whilst amplifying the most meaningful aspects of legal practice.
By taking on routine tasks, Habeas allows lawyers to dedicate more time and energy to the aspects of legal practice that require human judgment, critical thinking, and empathy. This includes strategy development, deep reading, client counseling, negotiation, and courtroom advocacy.
Enhancing Access to Justice
AI tools like Habeas have the potential democratize access to legal resources, enabling small practices and individual attorneys to perform complex research at a fraction of their traditional time and cost. This capability is particularly transformative for underrepresented populations who can benefit from higher-quality legal assistance that AI-equipped professionals can provide. With the cost savings and efficiency gains enabled by AI, law firms and individual lawyers may have greater capacity to take on pro bono cases and provide legal assistance to underserved communities. Over the long-term, we envision that generative AI and more advanced mechanisms for knowledge retrieval will be accessible by individuals looking to get a basic understanding of the law, and this will require lawyers to adapt accordingly.
So where does this leave us?
The integration of AI into legal research is not without its ethical challenges, but through careful implementation of ethical protocols, these challenges can be effectively managed. Specialised AI research platforms like Habeas are pioneering these efforts, ensuring that the process of revolutionizing legal research is achieved with a strong awareness of the ethical implications. By enhancing transparency, accountability, and bias mitigation, AI can be utilised to drive a more humane, accessible, and efficient practice of law, heralding a new era where law and technology work hand in hand to uphold justice.
If you're curious to learn more about Habeas and how it can help your firm's legal research, submit a form using our waitlist we'll get back to you!
