Professional responsibilities for supervising AI-generated legal outputs

Determine the professional responsibilities and verification standards that lawyers should follow when supervising and validating outputs produced by AI-driven legal research tools, including Lexis+ AI, Westlaw AI-Assisted Research, and Ask Practical Law AI, to enable responsible integration of artificial intelligence into legal practice.

Background

The paper evaluates leading AI-driven legal research tools and finds substantial rates of hallucination and incompleteness across products, underscoring ongoing risks in legal workflows. Because legal practice is governed by duties of competence and supervision, the integration of AI requires clarity about how attorneys must verify and oversee AI outputs.

The authors note that providers’ claims of “hallucination-free” performance are not supported by transparent evidence and that empirical performance varies across systems. This variability, together with the closed nature of proprietary tools, makes it difficult for practitioners to know precisely what responsibilities they must meet when using AI in legal research, leaving the definition of those responsibilities an open question.