10 Using AI for legal advice and information

A cartoon of a robot sat with a laptop on its knees. Around it are five circles with cartoons of different people – three women and two men, and three speech bubbles.

LLMs can be extremely useful: they can provide information quickly, cheaply and in an understandable format. They could potentially enable greater access to justice for individuals, as well as helping legal professionals and advice workers to be more efficient in their roles.

However, as outlined in the previous section, there are a number of concerns about how these tools work and the outputs they produce. These concerns are increased when GenAI is used for legal advice and information.

You have learnt that LLMs are trained on vast quantities of data taken from the internet. However, accurate information about the current law is kept in commercial databases which are behind a paywall. This information has not been used for LLM training, which means that general LLMs are more likely to answer legal queries inaccurately.

9 Why are these issues of concern?

11 Specific concerns when using Generative AI in a legal context