Friend or Foe? Lexis Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Legal Writing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the law are becoming more popular, moving from downloadable forms, to generating and critiquing contracts and handbooks, and even generating text. Lexis has two major research products that appeal especially to first-year students. The first product is Brief Analysis, which analyzes documents and provides suggestions for additional research. Brief Analysis is more appropriately used to expand research for briefs, motions, and other types of persuasive writing, but could be used to review research and citations for objective memos. The second product is a downloadable add-on that enables research to be done side-by-side with the writing of a document. Although the product has many helpful functions, including formatting options, first-year students would likely be most enthusiastic about the function that checks the cite format of the document written.

Both Lexis products are useful research tools as well as beneficial in checking the accuracy of citations. However, as is true of most programs that help legal writers and researchers by invoking particular algorithms, its output is only as good as its input. Moreover, even though the products can verify the pagination for cases cited, the program does not automatically correct citations and put them into appropriate citation format. Whether for research purposes or cite-checking purposes, the output could be misleading for first-year students who rely literally on the information presented.