Can artificial intelligence (AI) improve the quality and quantity of lawyers' legal texts?

A recent study conducted by two law professors from the University of Minnesota and a law professor from the University of Southern California has shown that the use of AI-based tools by law students increases their productivity. However, the quality of the tasks performed by the test subjects was no better than that of the colleagues who did not use these tools.

To carry out this study, sixty law students from the University of Minnesota were recruited, who received several hours of training to use Chat GPT-4 and then complete four different written tasks. These tasks consisted of writing:

i) a complaint;

ii) a contract;

iii) a section of an employee handbook; and

iv) a note from the customer.

Each of the participants used Chat GPT-4 in two of those tasks and completed the other two with the help of this tool, and the tasks were graded.

The results showed that the use of Chat GPT-4 by those students with the worst grades increased the quality of their legal writing, in contrast to the results of their classmates with better grades, who did not see a similar improvement in their tasks. This suggests that the benefits of artificial intelligence vary depending on the user's abilities and the type of legal work they do.

On the other hand, while the authors of the study observed that Chat GPT-4 did not result in any statistical improvement except for the task of drafting the contract. However, large and consistent decreases were identified in the amount of time it took participants to complete tasks when using Chat GPT-4. In particular, students who used Chat GPT-4 to write a complaint spent 32% less time on that task.

These results demonstrate the usefulness of AI-based tools in the legal world and foreshadow their potential increasing use in the daily lives of professionals and students in the legal sector.