The legal system in India is recognised around the world as an independent and impartial system fiercely guarding the rights of its citizens. In spite of its impressive track record, the Indian legal system faces many challenges like long delays in passing judgments and pending of cases. Currently there are more than five crore pending cases in India’s various courts as per the data available in the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).

Artificial Intelligence can play an important role in improving upon the notion that “justice delayed is justice denied” and help in reducing the delays and load of pending cases.

The significant benefits of AI applications can be simplifying legal research, AI’s role in predicting case outcomes, and reducing delays. AI tools can analyse more information, more thoroughly than humans can, in a tiny fraction of the time.

AI can quickly:

• Search through and identify discoverable or potentially relevant data of all forms and file types
• Conduct legal research that would take a skilled lawyer days to complete
• Analyse contracts and other documents for errors, missing information, and inconsistent language
• Enhances creative analysis and identification of persuasive precedents

AI allows more accurate risk assessment. Advanced AI tools can be used to review information in real-time. This allows lawyers to identify potential risks earlier, advise clients wisely about their exposure, and head off legal problems before they even occur.AI produces higher-quality work. Specialized document software can enhance the organization of documents and flawlessly maintain that organization, including all internal cross-references, through the life of the document.

AI improves organizational and logical structure. With automatic document comparison and organization, attorneys can more quickly identify holes or gaps in their documents and even in their legal analyses.

Some disadvantages of using AI in law

Legal problems are based on personal issues and relationship tangles between individuals and /or entities. A serious limitation of AI is that it cannot adequately grasp these complex legal concepts and lose the context. This limitation could result in the misinterpretation of the law and other inaccuracies. Legal professionals mustn’t rely on this technology without detailed human oversight.

There are significant other limitations of using AI. For example, hallucination (creation of artificial data) which can be seen in the case of Mata v. Avianca, in which a New York Lawyer submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. Ethical considerations like Jailbreaking (an AI feature) which lays down detailed plan of action to commit illegal activities like murder or robbery etc.

Furthermore, there are also concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality. Because of the way that A.I. is trained; data supplied by its users has the potential to make it into the public domain to be used by others. Additionally, because A.I. technology has such a fast development cycle, there are inherent vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit, leading to data breaches.

Finally, because A.I. does not provide source references or explanations for the output it generates, there is a chance that copyrighted material is used in compiling its answers, leading the practitioner to unknowingly violate copyright law. That is why it is not possible to ignore the human element and human due diligence in the legal field.