There are numerous benefits of using AI in legal research. But at CaseSnappy, we know that those benefits are only existent if AI is used with a consideration of the risks and ethical concerns of using AI. This module will take you through these benefits, and the next will take you through the risks.

The general advantages of AI are fairly well known:

Stuart Russell has argued in admittedly ‘very crude terms’ that AI might be worth a staggering US $13,500 trillion if, based on its stated goals, it can deliver a respectable living standard for everyone – with the obvious caveat being that we would first need a plan to achieve such a goal. Claims have also been made by Russell that the use of AI technologies in healthcare could help to slowly eradicate disease.

But what about the benefits of using AI in legal research specifically? Well, we first have to consider the problems with traditional legal research.

Reading legal judgments in full can take hours. Extracting the relevant information adds more time. This results in significant productivity loss. The content on existing legal summary sites is often written by humans. This makes it rife with human error, inconsistencies and subjective interpretation. These factors combine to mean that legal research is often frustrating and boring. At worst, this means that many students will simply avoid legal research.

Using AI in legal research to provide summaries can therefore eliminate unnecessary reading at the outset, saving students hours of otherwise wasted time. Remember the 98 pages and 43,438 words long judgment in Miller I? CaseSnappy’s summary of the same case is 1 page and 350 words long.

This advancing use of technology in research will free up time and shift priorities toward more complex, higher-value work. While there may be some initial disruption — including potential retraining — the long-term efficiency gains will be substantial.

Moreover, AI is incredibly clever. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the ‘Godfathers’ of AI, has claimed that GPT-4, one of the AI models from research laboratory OpenAI, knows ‘hundreds of times more’ information than any single human. Therefore, AI-derived insights can provide a better understanding of the law through easily digestible content which is ideal for a quick reference.

Beyond this, AI can help make legal research more accessible for those with learning difficulties such as dyslexia:

Recommendations from the British Dyslexia Association state that sans-serif fonts, bold headings and concise, simple language can all make text more dyslexia-friendly.

As you may know as a student, traditionally formatted legal judgments are therefore rarely dyslexia friendly. However, AI can overcome these issues, especially through the use of concise and simple language (say goodbye to large, unformatted texts with convoluted language!).