Using AI in legal work requires verifying sources

Artificial intelligence (AI) can prepare a legally convincing answer within seconds, find a seemingly relevant court ruling and build an argument. The creator of ECLI.ai, a legal information analysis platform, says that for AI to be used safely in professional legal work, a lawyer must be able to check which sources and facts an answer rests on, while final responsibility for the conclusion stays with the lawyer.

Checking whether rulings are still current

An AI tool can quickly find a ruling that addressed a similar question. Before relying on it for a specific case, however, both the factual circumstances and the later course of the case must be checked. A decision from a higher instance may change how the original ruling applies, and a conclusion reached in another case may rest on different legislation or different circumstances.

A search result or an AI-generated summary is therefore not enough. A lawyer needs to be able to open the original decision, see the related documents and confirm that the source is still up to date.

Comparing the specific passage

Finding the right source does not end the verification. The lawyer must be able to locate and read the exact part of the document behind the AI's conclusion and compare the system's wording with the original. This shows whether the passage really supports the conclusion and whether a condition important to the case has been left out. In this way AI can be used for finding sources and gathering initial information, while professional checking remains in the lawyer's hands.

The source base matters too

What matters is not only how AI processes a question but also which sources it can access. If the database lacks current decisions, or documents are not linked to the later progress of a case, even a well-formulated answer may rest on incomplete information. A professional tool therefore needs a regularly updated, structured legal information base that allows decisions to be analysed in relation to one another.

AI can help with initial research, especially when a large volume of information must be organised, but the material found still has to be assessed in the context of the particular case. The easier it is to trace the sources used, the safer it is to use AI as an aid in legal research.