A client discovers their lawyer is using an AI tool like ChatGPT to help draft a contract. A legal team uses an AI notetaker to summarize a confidential strategy meeting. These are no longer futuristic scenarios—they are today’s reality in many law practices. If you find out your attorney is using artificial intelligence, your first reaction might be a mix of curiosity and concern. Is this cutting-edge efficiency, or a risky shortcut?
The legal profession is in a period of significant transition. A 2025 perspective notes that approximately 79% of law firms have integrated some form of AI into their workflows. The key question isn’t whether your lawyer uses technology, but how they use it. Used wisely, AI can be a powerful tool that benefits your case. Used carelessly, it can create serious ethical and legal problems.
Understanding the core issues can help you have an informed, productive conversation with your legal counsel and ensure your interests remain protected.
The Allure and the Acceleration: Why Lawyers Turn to AI
Before diving into the risks, it’s helpful to understand the appeal. Lawyers are adopting AI for many of the same reasons other professionals do: to save time and manage complexity.
AI tools can help legal teams sift through thousands of documents during the discovery phase of a lawsuit, identify standard clauses in contracts, or perform an initial review of case law on a specific topic. This can allow your lawyer to redirect precious hours away from repetitive tasks and toward the high-value, strategic thinking your case requires: crafting arguments, negotiating settlements, and advising you directly.
When used as a supplement to a lawyer’s expertise—not a replacement—this technology aims for a more efficient and potentially more affordable legal process. The goal of the best implementations is augmentation, not replacement, enhancing a lawyer’s distinctly human skills of judgment, empathy, and advocacy.
The Core Concerns: Where Risks Can Emerge
Despite its potential, the integration of AI into law practice raises several red flags that ethical attorneys must navigate, and that clients should be aware of.
1. Confidentiality and Privacy Breaches
This is one of the most significant risks. When you share sensitive information with your lawyer, it is protected by attorney-client privilege and strict rules of confidentiality. However, when that information is typed into a public AI chatbot, those protections can vanish.
Most public AI platforms, including free versions of tools like ChatGPT, explicitly state in their terms of service that they may use user inputs to train their models. This means the details of your business dispute, your personal injury claim, or your divorce settlement could be stored on a third-party server and potentially reviewed by AI trainers or even surface in response to another user’s query. As one ethics committee starkly put it, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”.
Legal ethics rules require lawyers to “make reasonable efforts” to prevent unauthorized disclosure of client information. Inputting confidential case details into an AI system without robust, verifiable security guarantees may breach this duty.
2. The “Hallucination” Problem: Inaccurate or Fabricated Information
AI language models are designed to generate plausible-sounding text, not to discern truth. They are prone to “hallucinations”—confidently presenting completely fabricated information as fact. This is disastrous in law, where precision is paramount.
The now-infamous case of a New York lawyer who used ChatGPT for legal research is a stark warning. The lawyer submitted a court brief containing six entirely fictitious case citations invented by the AI, complete with bogus judicial quotes and internal citations. The lawyer faced sanctions, a fine, and a major blow to his professional reputation because he failed to verify the AI’s output against primary legal sources.
These models can also provide dangerously outdated information, as they are trained on historical data snapshots and may not know about recent court rulings or changes in statute. Relying on such information can undermine your entire legal position.
3. The Loss of Nuance and Human Judgment
Law is not a simple matter of finding the right template. It involves understanding the unique facts of your situation, the subtleties of local court rules, the temperament of a specific judge, and your personal goals.
AI lacks this capacity for nuanced judgment. It might generate a standard contract clause that is unenforceable in your state, or recommend a litigation strategy based on statistical patterns while ignoring a crucial emotional or strategic element of your case. As one law firm notes, AI tools often provide “one-size-fits-all solutions” that may omit critical, situation-specific terms.
Your lawyer’s value lies in applying experience and professional judgment to your unique circumstances—something AI cannot replicate.
4. Accountability: Who Is Responsible for the AI’s Mistake?
If an AI tool makes an error that harms your case, who is liable? The answer is clear under legal ethics rules: your lawyer is always responsible. Courts have not been sympathetic to lawyers who blame technology for their own lack of oversight.
Lawyers have a “duty of competence,” which now includes understanding the benefits and risks of the technology they use. This means they cannot blindly trust AI output. They must critically review, verify, and take full professional responsibility for any work product they submit on your behalf. If they outsource their judgment to an algorithm, they are failing in their fundamental duty to you.
Having the Conversation: What You Can Do
Knowing the risks empowers you to be an active participant in your own legal representation. Here are some practical steps you can take.
- Ask Direct Questions: Don’t be afraid to ask your lawyer if they use AI tools in their practice. A transparent and ethical lawyer will be willing to discuss this. You can ask:
- “Do you use AI tools like ChatGPT for any part of your legal work?”
- “How do you ensure my confidential information is protected when using any external software?”
- “What is your process for checking the accuracy of any AI-generated research or drafting?”
- Listen for Red Flags and Green Lights.
- Concerning Answer: “I let the AI draft the entire contract and I just put my name on it.”
- Reassuring Answer: “We sometimes use specialized, secure legal software to help with initial document review or to check for standard clauses, but a qualified attorney always conducts the final analysis, tailoring everything to your specific needs.”
- Understand the Security Measures. Inquire about the specific tools they use. Enterprise-grade legal AI platforms often have strict data security agreements, keeping your information confidential and not using it to train public models. The use of such vetted, professional tools is very different from using a consumer chatbot.
- Give or Withhold Informed Consent. In some situations, depending on the tool and the task, your lawyer may be ethically required to obtain your informed consent before using AI on your matter. You have the right to ask questions about the risks and benefits before agreeing.
The Bottom Line: Vigilance, Not Alarmism
The use of AI in law is not inherently good or bad. Like any tool, its value depends on the skill and ethics of the person using it. A competent, ethical lawyer will use AI to enhance their service to you while meticulously guarding your confidentiality, verifying all information, and maintaining full professional responsibility.
Your takeaway should not be panic, but informed vigilance. A lawyer who embraces technology with appropriate caution and robust safeguards may be more efficient and thorough. However, a lawyer who uses AI as an unmonitored shortcut is failing in their core duties.
The fundamental principles of the attorney-client relationship—competence, confidentiality, diligence, and loyalty—remain unchanged by technology. Your lawyer’s job is to navigate these new tools while steadfastly upholding those timeless duties to you.
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