To AI or not to AI…
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6525800
Artificial Intelligence and Human Legal Reasoning
Empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates that generative artificial intelligence has the capacity to improve the speed and quality of legal work, yet many lawyers, judges, and clients are reluctant to fully embrace AI. One important reason for hesitation is the concern that AI may undermine the human reasoning and judgment on which competent legal practice depends. This Article provides the first empirical evidence evaluating that concern by testing whether upper level law students who rely on AI at an early stage of a project experience reduced comprehension and impaired legal reasoning on later stages when AI is not an available option.
To evaluate the possibility that AI degrades comprehension and reasoning, we conducted a randomized controlled trial involving approximately one hundred second and third year law students at the University of Minnesota Law School. Participants completed four sequential lawyering tasks: writing a memo synthesizing the law based on a packet of legal materials, answering closed-book multiple choice questions that tested their comprehension of the materials, writing a memo applying the materials to a fact pattern, and revising their second memo. Participants were randomly assigned either to a control group, which could not use AI until the final revision task, or to an AI-exposed group, which used AI during both the initial synthesis task and the final revision task, but not during the intervening comprehension and application tasks.
The results provide a more complex picture of AI’s effects on legal reasoning than critics or enthusiasts often assume. As expected, participants who used AI to help craft synthesis memos produced substantially stronger work and completed that task more quickly. But contrary to our preregistered hypothesis, AI exposure at this initial stage did not diminish downstream comprehension of the underlying legal principles. To the contrary, participants who used AI on the synthesis task outperformed the control group on the later application task even when neither group had access to AI. Yet when all participants used AI to revise their reasoning memos, participants who started with weaker memos improved while participants who started with stronger memos regressed. These findings suggest that AI does not inevitably erode or promote independent legal reasoning, but that its effects depend on when and how law students and junior lawyers use AI. The Article builds on this insight by suggesting best practices for AI use and avenues for further empirical research.
Tools & Techniques. (Got an old laptop?)
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This $3 flash drive turned my ancient laptop into a working Chromebook
