Questioning producers and accepting consumers: responses to artificial intelligence amongst legal professionals

Recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) are having a profound effect on the contemporary workplace; reshaping the working practices of individual professionals and the structure of the firms they work within. Legal services are increasingly delivered through socio-technical systems underpinned by AI technology. This means many legal professionals now interact with AI on a daily basis in the delivery of their work. The ways in which experts respond to novel technologies can be hard to predict. While some show a passive acceptance of the technology and are happy for it to remain a ‘black box’, others question the technology to develop a deep understanding of how it works.
This research was motivated by a desire to better understand the experiences of legal professionals who use AI to deliver legal services to their clients. The research was phenomena-led and conducted using a critical realist case study design, with data generated at two UK commercial law firms, from a sample of 21 legal professionals.
The research contributes to our understanding of AI and the professions by exploring both the mental models through which legal professionals interpret AI, and the causal pathways that explain their use of AI. In doing so, the research reveals differences in the practices of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of AI-enabled legal services, and the emergence of a novel ‘liminal’ role that has developed alongside them.