Should I use AI for my legal dispute?

Everyone’s life is being touched by AI whether they know it or not. At Helix we have spent the last 18 months evaluating AI and then embedding it into our workflows.

We are an agile tech focused firm that has been in the Cloud since 2012. We think about technology a lot.

AI is a wonderful tool, and it is improving exponentially. Any predictions one makes now are likely to look foolish in 12 months’ time.

Nevertheless, you must try to make predictions and prepare for them. So here are mine for the next 12 months:

An increase in the number of issued claims using AI instead of a solicitor

When it comes to money and business, the majority of people can be very aggressive if they think that they have been wronged. If you make it easy for them to issue a claim they will.

However, their appetite for court proceedings is usually greatly reduced after speaking with a litigation solicitor who explains the costs and risks of court claims. That is a good thing and saves people wasting money on bad claims or claims with low prospects of recovery. There are so many things to consider before issuing a claim, only an experienced litigator will know what must be considered. Having a good claim is only one of a number of factors.

Instead of getting necessary advice from a solicitor, an aggrieved person will now believe that they can pursue a claim through the courts without a solicitor by using AI. That will be a mistake. AI is only as good as the information you give it; the questions you ask it and your ability to test the accuracy of the answers and documents it gives you.

In general, most people will do almost anything before they pay a solicitor for their expertise and experience. I understand that, historically lawyers have been very expensive and inaccessible.

Big Tech is putting hugely powerful AI tools in everyone’s hands and encouraging us to use them. That looks very cheap and very accessible.

A natural consequence of this is that people will think that AI can replace proper legal advice and pull the trigger on a claim before getting grown up advice. This will increase the number of claims.

A decrease in the cost of resolving disputes through a solicitor

Historically, litigation through a solicitor has been very expensive. The majority of the costs are for acquiring, reading and interpreting documents – often in there are hundreds or tens of thousands of relevant documents and emails. For humans to read and review these is really expensive.

Helix now has industry leading AI software to automate much of the review and interpretation of the documents. This is bringing down costs as we begin to learn how to use these tools.

If clients can give us all their documents in an efficient way we can advise in an efficient way.

At Helix we are more able to focus our time on high level advice rather than paper pushing. We will resolve more disputes in less time and less money. AI allows us to spend more time on the client than the paperwork.

Should you use AI instead of a solicitor to resolve disputes?

In short, no. A little knowledge, or AI, is a dangerous thing.

Being 90% right in a legal battle can be the same as being completely wrong. If you bring a claim using AI, you will save your own legal costs but you may end up paying your opponent’s legal costs if you lose. AI can go badly wrong if you give it the wrong information or the wrong questions. Even if it has the right information and the right questions, it can hallucinate and you will not be able to tell the difference.

There are so many things to consider before bringing or defending a claim. An AI model is unlikely to consider those factors or conduct a risk assessment – it will give you the answer you have asked for. The vast majority of non-lawyers simply don’t know what to ask. If you use AI for legal disputes you are at risk of being defeated by an unknown unknown.

How should you harness AI to help you with disputes?

For the reasons above, we think it is unwise to use AI to run litigation without a solicitor.

The better strategy is to use a solicitor who uses AI to drive down cost and increase the accuracy of their advice.

At Helix we can now accept thousands of documents and review them for anywhere from a half to a tenth of the cost before AI.

We know what documents to feed it, and we know what questions to ask. We also use an industry leading AI trained specifically for legal problems and we have the expertise to check and revise the answers.

The single best thing you can do is manage your documents, emails and messages for a given contract so that you can easily transfer them to Helix for us to use a specialist AI on your behalf.