As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) software is increasingly foisted upon both private and public sector workforces, with the now familiar mantra of “boosting productivity”, many lawyers have attempted to harness some of the tools for legal research. In this article we consider the scale of the uptake and identify some of the risks, alongside expert comment from leading industry insiders.
What GenAI tools are being used?
At present, there are essentially two buckets of GenAI software being used for legal research:
Generalist
These include the big three – OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot – alongside smaller players such as Perplexity, Claude and Deepseek. Although these tools are not specifically designed for the legal sector, they can provide useful answers to basic legal questions and are low cost or free, arguably a boon for access to justice. Many law firms actively encourage fee earners to use Copilot in particular, perhaps in part due to it being increasingly baked into Microsoft Office and Windows. Although these generalist large language models (LLMs) have the lowest barriers to adoption, they are the most prone to providing erroneous information or hallucinations.
Legal specific
The legal AI bonanza, recently predicted to be worth in excess of $10 billion by 2030, has been driven by the promise of more reliable GenAI tools, with Harvey recently raising $300 million funding at an eye watering $5 billion valuation. Incumbent legal publishing behemoths have released their own legal-specific LLMs (Lexis+ AI and CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters) which have been trained exclusively on their own repositories of legal information and therefore claim to be more accurate and less prone to hallucination. However, tests have revealed that even these expensive GenAI tools developed specifically for legal professionals cannot be relied upon.
How many lawyers are using GenAI?
According to a recent report from LexisNexis, 61 per cent of legal professionals now use generative AI for work purposes, with around half of them solely using generalist tools. However, 76 per cent of lawyers are concerned about using AI for legal research due to the possibility of inaccurate information and digital hallucinations, and only 17 per cent believe that AI is embedded in their strategy and operations.
The full report
https://www.infolaw.co.uk/newsletter/2025/09/the-risks-of-using-genai-for-legal-research/
