Technological advancements are rapidly changing many industries, including the business law profession. A common question arises: can artificial intelligence (AI) replace lawyers? Already, AI solutions are significantly transforming certain legal processes. AI is sparking debate about the future of this profession and raising implications for business law firms in Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond.
How Is AI Already Enhancing the Legal Field?
The use of AI in law is not a new phenomenon, but its growth has accelerated in recent years. Tools like Casetext’s CoCounsel and Lex Machina allow lawyers to search and analyze legal texts, court rulings, and even predict litigation outcomes more quickly and accurately. Research that previously took hours or days can now be completed in minutes. AI can also swiftly identify potentially problematic clauses in contracts or analyze thousands of pages of documentation.
Interestingly, we have tested several AI legal tools ourselves. When using AI for contract review, AI quickly identified key elements and summarized them. While the results were impressive, AI’s capabilities end where intuition, judgment, and reliance on practical experience become essential. For instance, AI failed to recognize contentious contract clauses that could likely lead to litigation. If a user relied solely on AI-generated results and recommendations, they might receive a visually polished contract that is not tailored to the specific needs of the industry and client, potentially leading to legal disputes.
Additionally, the ability to predict litigation outcomes intrigued us. Given the Balkan legal systems’ reliance on judicial discretion, this function is not practical for the region. Our legal team has encountered cases with identical legal qualifications where different judicial panels of the same court interpreted the case entirely differently. Resulting in a favorable ruling in one case and a loss in another. As even lawyers increasingly avoid predicting the success of litigation due to similar experiences, we believe this AI feature will not be particularly useful in the Balkans.
AI’s Competitive Pricing and Advantages
One of AI’s biggest advantages is its cost efficiency. AI-powered legal tools offer affordable options for routine tasks like contract review and legal research. However, lawyers provide a much broader range of services – from in-depth analysis of complex cases to crafting legal strategies and engaging in personal communication with clients. Since we are talking about different spectrums of legal services, comparing the pricing of two distinct legal approaches is challenging.
AI and Contract Review
Contract review is another area where AI demonstrates its strength. Platforms like Kira Systems and Luminance use machine learning to identify legal risks and ensure compliance with the law. These technologies can analyze hundreds of pages in record time, reducing the risk of human error and speeding up legal processes. Such capabilities are especially practical when representing clients operating across multiple legal systems, where rapid analysis of unfamiliar legal norms is required. It is certainly convenient to have a quick display of relevant legal standards and their compliance with current laws.
However, this research is still a preliminary foundation and should not be used as a final stance on a particular legal issue. The expertise of lawyers in a specific industry remains an indispensable step in any serious legal analysis. Regulations change daily, and there are numerous sub-laws and internal regulations AI may not be familiar with, which can significantly alter the legal qualification of a dispute.
Can artificial intelligence (AI) replace lawyers?
While AI legal tools deliver incredible results and largely completes tasks typically handled by junior lawyers (often focused on research and comparative practices), there are limitations that will prevent it from fully replacing lawyers. In the future, AI will likely reduce the demand for junior lawyers, as it will become the primary source of information and relevant practices, tasks that once took junior lawyers days to research. Over time, this will impact the number of lawyers, but AI certainly cannot fully replace them. AI can take over routine tasks, but the role of lawyers will likely transform rather than disappear. Lawyers will increasingly use legal AI software as a support tool, while focusing on crafting legal strategies, maintaining personal client contact, and managing complex legal issues. Instead of a threat, AI becomes a partner in the evolution of the legal profession.
Due to this fact, IA Law Firm continuously monitors advancements in information technology and business law to provide clients with the highest quality of service.
If you would like to try out the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), you can do so via the following link: ChatGPT
For more information on IA Law Firm’s expertise and range of services in the field of Information technologies, please visit: Information technologies, media, and telecommunications | IA Lawfirm
