Authorized and Unauthorized Practices of Law: The Role of Autonomous Levels of AI Legal Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper examines how different autonomous levels of AI legal reasoning impact the distinction between authorized and unauthorized legal practices, providing a framework to clarify legal boundaries amid AI advancements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework mapping AI legal reasoning levels to authorized and unauthorized legal practices, aiding understanding of AI's disruptive potential in law.

Findings

Framework clarifies legal boundaries for AI practices

Highlights potential disruptions in legal profession due to AI

Provides insights for policy and regulation development

Abstract

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) that are being applied to legal efforts have raised controversial questions about the existent restrictions imposed on the practice-of-law. Generally, the legal field has sought to define Authorized Practices of Law (APL) versus Unauthorized Practices of Law (UPL), though the boundaries are at times amorphous and some contend capricious and self-serving, rather than being devised holistically for the benefit of society all told. A missing ingredient in these arguments is the realization that impending legal profession disruptions due to AI can be more robustly discerned by examining the matter through the lens of a framework utilizing the autonomous levels of AI Legal Reasoning (AILR). This paper explores a newly derived instrumental grid depicting the key characteristics underlying APL and UPL as they apply to the AILR autonomous levels and offers key insights for the furtherance of these crucial practice-of-law debates.