What are law bots?
Law bots are simply chatbots with a legal application, either used externally with those seeking legal advice or resources, or internally within law firms or across in-house legal teams. Sometimes they are called “legal chatbots” or “legal AI chatbots” or increasingly just legal AI.
The birth of law bots
When we first originally wrote a knowledge article about “law bots” several years ago, the idea of chatbots making legal services more accessible and more efficient, was largely something for the future. The benefit of deploying a chatbot was that it could potentially provide a convenient, automated interface to
- Answer simple questions.
- Point people towards legal resources.
- Gather initial information from people.
This would enable a way that could help people get information more quickly and save lawyers time which could be focused on more important matters. We cited some examples including DoNotPay.com, an AI legal chatbot championing consumer causes that is still around today.
Our article concluded somewhat optimistically that
“Law bots will transform the way law firms and law departments deal with customer or client queries. They can accelerate quote processes, direct clients to the right lawyers within the firm or department, make sure clients get the right information and streamline the instruction process.”
Slow progress on law bots for all
Since then, a lot has happened with chatbots, with these commonly deployed on customer websites, as well as internally within larger enterprises to answer employee questions. Generative AI has also arrived and is heavily disrupting how we interact with technology. It is also elevating the experience of chatbots with greater understanding and far more naturalistic and sophisticated responses.
Despite these advances with chatbots, the legal industry has generally been slow to deploy chatbot functionality to interact directly with those seeking advice, potentially making legal information accessible for more people. While there are some examples, such as Nessa, a family law chatbot provided by OLS Solicitors, overall progress has been slow. You are very unlikely to find a chatbot on a law firm website.
There are likely multiple reasons for this:
- There are still many associated risks with chatbots giving erroneous answers either through wrong or nuanced phrasing or even ‘hallucinations’.
- Some legal firms are generally slow to adopt new technology.
- The complexities and sensitives in describing a situation requiring legal advice is not ideally suited to an automated interface and will be off putting for both private individuals and corporate customers.
- There are some challenges around data privacy.
- The cost, effort and resources required to train a chatbot and prepare content to support legal answers can be very high and are also unpredictable
- The AI market is still moving incredibly fast and products are advancing quickly which makes investment and deployment decisions less than straightforward.
It is also worth noting that many people may also be using services like ChatGPT directly to try and find legal resources and even guidance, which obviously comes with significant risk. An exercise by academics at the Open University found using ChatGPT to find legal resources was strewn with errors.
Law bots for internal use
There are an increasing number of legal chatbot and AI products that can potentially help law firms to deploy legal chatbots that can:
- provide simple answers to legal and compliance-related questions.
- provide a conversational interface to automate processes such as the client intake process.
- be an interface to access AI-driven products launched by individual law firms.
With limited deployment directly to clients or the public to date, there has been a far greater use of these products to deploy law bots for internal use within law firms, enterprises and across in-house legal teams. These legal chatbots:
- connect legal professionals with knowledge and resources such as precedents.
- automate processes around contract management.
- enable non-legal professionals within a firm to ask simple legal questions and get answers or route them to the right contact.
Since the emergence of generative AI, the number of AI-powered law bot and legal AI products that are aimed at legal professionals has accelerated. Some of these are new standalone offerings from start-ups while others are new services or “add-ons” to existing products from established providers to the legal industry like Thomson Reuters.
Leading examples include Juro, a product that aims to automate contract management, as well as Harvey, an AI platform which focuses on the legal and professional services market. Harvey already lists a number of leading firms as clients including PwC, A&O Shearman, Macfarlanes and CMS, while in-house teams from enterprises such as Repsol and Microsoft are also using it. Harvey not only has several AI-powered products, but also supports bespoke offerings, including services which can then be offered directly by a law firm to its clients.
At the same time services such as ChatGPT are also being used more generally by the legal industry and in-house legal teams in everyday tasks such as writing emails, generating meeting notes and more.
What’s next for legal chatbots?
It’s difficult to fully predict what will happen with legal chatbots, but it is likely we will see much greater use of AI in the industry, and that effectively means more law bots.
Generative AI is still moving incredibly fast and the legal AI industry continues to evolve. New products will emerge and existing products will become more sophisticated. The next big wave of generative AI – the emergence of semi-autonomous AI agents which complete tasks for you – have the potential to drive automation that is triggered by natural language commands.
The wider use of generative AI in the legal world and outside it may also mean that chatbot interfaces become more trusted and acceptable for both legal professionals and those seeking advice, with the increased sophistication of legal AI ironing out some of the current risks.
Over the next three years or so it is also possible the idea of the “law bot” may start to disappear as “conversational interfaces” are normalised as a standard way we interact with technology. Every product we use may end up having a chatbot with it as standard.
Whatever happens we are interesting times, where AI and chatbots will likely increasingly play a part in the working day of legal professionals and their clients.