Impact of artificial intelligence on the confidentiality in legal profession

Abstract

Advocate client privilege is of paramount importance in legal profession. No matter the personal opinion, an advocate must represent his client with his full potential. Also the documents submitted to the advocates and courts are considered as confidential in nature. An advocate cannot sell the brief paper no matter the client left him decades ago. He can destroy it but cannot sell it for commercial value. This is the gravity of confidentiality in this relationship. There are many AI based software like Lex Machina, Everlaw, Kira etc which are developed to analyze Law, facts, Documents etc and produce expected outcome of a legal proceeding. These softwares consider variety of aspects such as Facts of similar cases, Case Laws, Advocates standing, Judges orientation towards particular types of cases, previous similar cases decided by the court etc. In order to analyze all of it, we must input the details of current case such as facts, Exhibits and Articles, Arguments etc. This all data that we upload is stored in a repository and is used to analyze further cases. The question is how safe is this data stored in the repository. Will it be shown to anyone or just kept locked. Artificial intelligence is designed to learn and develop, as far as possible, like a human brain. We have experience of marketing AI, which people feel, is infringing on their privacy. The question is should that be allowed in legal field. After analyzing the available data it is observed that many of these softwares mainly focus on the analyzing the legal documents such as contract and assess the risk factor. A few softwares that predict the outcome of a legal proceeding pose no threat to the confidentiality as such. However we must be cautious regarding the development of the AI in legal profession.