AI in Legal Practice: Opportunities, Risks, and Ethics

Generative AI has moved from novelty to daily workflow in many law firms and legal departments. Used well, it compresses hours of routine drafting and review into minutes. Used carelessly, it produces confident, plausible, and entirely fictitious case citations that have already led to sanctions in several jurisdictions. For lawyers, the interesting question is no longer whether to engage with AI, but how to capture its value while honoring the professional obligations that make the work trustworthy in the first place.

The strongest use cases are those where a knowledgeable human remains firmly in control and the AI accelerates a task the lawyer already knows how to check. First drafts are the clearest win: engagement letters, client update emails, internal memos, and standard clauses can be generated quickly and then edited to fit the matter. Summarising is another: condensing a long deposition, a dense regulatory filing, or a bundle of correspondence into a structured brief saves real time, provided you spot-check the summary against the source.

AI also supports legal research and document review — surfacing relevant passages, clustering documents by theme in discovery, and flagging clauses in a contract that deviate from a playbook. Purpose-built legal platforms such as Harvey and CoCounsel are designed for these workflows and connect to curated legal databases rather than the open internet, which reduces (though does not eliminate) the risk of fabricated authority. General-purpose chatbots can help with brainstorming, plain-language explanations, and structure, but they are not authoritative sources of law.

Large language models generate text by predicting likely sequences of words, not by retrieving verified facts. This means they can invent case names, docket numbers, quotations, and holdings that look completely authentic. The failure is not occasional noise you can eyeball away — it is a structural property of how the technology works. Every citation, quotation, statutory reference, and factual assertion that comes out of an AI tool must be independently verified against a primary source before it enters a filing, an opinion, or advice to a client.