Generative AI and Dispute Resolution: A New Era

The AI Shift in Dispute Resolution

Artificial Intelligence ("AI") is transforming the dispute resolution landscape, impacting both litigation and arbitration. Its applications range from useful tools to potentially problematic practices. AI can aid in e-discovery, improve machine translation accuracy, assist with selecting arbitrators, and analyze judges' preferred arguments. It has even been used to identify anonymous entities in thousands of Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions within an hour or to create deepfake evidence. The legal profession's future is now more uncertain, with questions about whether AI will replace professionals in dispute resolution becoming increasingly relevant. This shift accelerated with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, followed by Google Bard and other advanced large language models ("LLMs"). The progression toward LLMs stacked upon LLMs is a matter of time.

What Are LLMs?

LLMs are designed to understand context and produce human-like text by predicting the next word in a sentence. They are trained on extensive datasets, learning from various sources, which allows them to perform well on tasks related to the training data. For instance, an LLM trained in legal documents would excel in responding to legal prompts.

Generative AI in Dispute Resolution

The role of LLMs in dispute resolution can be examined through three core functions, as outlined by Damien Charlotin in his article, "Large Language Models and the Future of Law."

1. Pattern Detection and Language Replication

LLMs are effective in the legal field, which is fundamentally about rules and applying them to facts. They excel at generating documents using templates, summarizing text, or predicting case outcomes. Examples of practical uses include drafting contracts, summarizing judgments, or identifying uncontested facts in legal submissions. However, LLMs may struggle with tasks that require deviation from patterns or established rules, which is where human expertise is crucial.

2. Generating High Volumes of Text Quickly and Cost-Effectively

LLMs can produce drafts, edit documents, and handle tasks like proofreading, allowing lawyers to focus on strategic and creative work. This shift also leads to younger lawyers taking on responsibilities traditionally held by more senior colleagues, in addition to learning how to generate effective AI prompts. Experiments have shown that AI can dissect legal provisions and generate meaningful commentary, though it may still produce inaccuracies, known as "hallucinations."

3. Interacting in a Human-Like Manner

LLMs lower the barrier to AI use in legal settings, making them suitable for legal chatbots or research tools. For example, Jus-AI is an advanced tool that goes beyond research by performing semantics-based searches to find the most relevant documents. However, reliance solely on LLMs for legal research can be problematic due to potential oversights and inaccuracies, especially with non-English sources.

LLMs can also bridge communication gaps between legal and technical professionals, such as by converting natural language prompts into Python code for automating tasks. Even with minimal technical knowledge, AI can help automate document processing or renumbering legal references, saving significant time.

Ensuring Compliance

As AI integration grows in dispute resolution, compliance with emerging regulations is crucial. Countries like the EU, US, and Canada are enacting laws to govern AI use, addressing concerns about data privacy, security, and ethical practices. For instance, the EU's proposed Artificial Intelligence Act would impose strict requirements on high-risk AI applications, including legal contexts. Confidentiality is another critical concern, and in-house LLMs are preferred to keep sensitive data secure and compliant with client confidentiality.

Despite AI's growing capabilities, human lawyers still hold ultimate responsibility for the quality of legal work. While LLMs can improve efficiency, they cannot replace the professional judgment necessary in the legal field.

Looking to the Future

The future of AI in law is uncertain, with some predicting that it could replace human lawyers, similar to how legal databases once rendered case reporters obsolete. Yet, challenges remain, such as the high energy consumption of advanced AI systems and ongoing copyright disputes over training data. Nonetheless, the demand for efficient legal services continues, prompting lawyers to balance AI's potential with the profession's core values—diligence, confidentiality, and ethics.

For Dispute Resolution Lawyers in Dubai, leveraging AI can offer significant advantages in meeting client expectations for efficient and cost-effective legal services.