Drew Simshaw (University of Nevada Las Vegas) has posted Legal Ethics of AI Snake Oil: Navigating the Hype, Harm, and Hope of Legal AI on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Artificial intelligence has generated both extraordinary optimism and profound concern within legal services, raising pressing questions about professional competence, confidentiality, supervision, candor, access to justice, and the future role of lawyers. Existing legal ethics debates often focus on whether AI systems are sufficiently accurate, reliable, or capable to perform legal tasks. This Article argues that such discussions are incomplete. Drawing on and extending the insights of Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s AI Snake Oil, the Article contends that many ethical challenges associated with legal AI are best understood not as failures of technology alone but as symptoms of deeper institutional conditions within the legal profession.
The Article develops a three-part framework for evaluating legal AI. First, it examines the technical limitations and risks of predictive and generative AI systems relevant to legal practice. Second, it argues that the demand for questionable AI solutions exposes underlying problems in legal services, including access-to-justice failures, regulatory barriers, economic pressures, and lawyer wellbeing challenges. Third, it broadens the legal ethics conversation by examining AI’s labor and environmental externalities and considering the responsibilities lawyers may bear in promoting more sustainable AI practices.
The Article ultimately argues that the legal ethics of AI cannot be reduced to questions of technological competence or accuracy. Effective governance of legal AI requires confronting the institutional incentives and structural conditions that shape how AI is developed, marketed, adopted, and used within legal services.
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Lawrence Solum