Raphael Segal, Legal Interact

At the end of June last year, the attorneys for the plaintiff in the case Parker v Forsyth N.O. & Others, at the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court, were rapped over the knuckles for using ChatGPT as part of their legal research. The problem didn’t lie with the fact that they had used the chatbot, but that they’d accepted the results generated by the platform without verifying their accuracy. “It seems to the court that they placed undue faith in the veracity of the legal research generated by artificial intelligence and lazily omitted to verify the research,” the court judgment read.

But this isn’t deterring the profession from using AI tools to improve and augment the work they do. A recent survey from Dutch information services company Wolters Kluwer found that nearly three-quarters of lawyers plan to use GenAI in their day-to-day activities – for drafting contracts, writing legal memoranda or sifting through piles of case law. A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University found that legal services is among the industries most exposed to occupational change from generative AI. And research from economists at Goldman Sachs in 2023 estimated that 44% of legal work could be automated by AI tools.