AI's Role in Law: Assistance, Not Replacement

Full Baldy Center Blog Post here: https://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/multimedia/blog/24-25-blog.html#50  
Danielle Limbaugh and John Beverley 

Leveraging sophisticated chatbots seems in many ways foreign to the creative, trusted, and impactful work done by legal professionals. A question of growing importance is:

How do we promote trust among legal professionals with respect to platforms and tools leveraging modern advances in AI?

There is reason to be hopeful: ontology engineering, a discipline which focuses on the creation of structured vocabularies and relationships within data. Techniques from the field of ontology engineering have long been leveraged for promoting explainability, as they aim to make explicit the implicit formal structure of data. When AI systems are built on well-structured ontologies, they:

  1. Provide clear reasoning paths for their conclusions;

  2. Make explicit the relationships between different legal concepts;

  3. Help identify relevant precedents and principles more accurately; and

  4. Maintain consistency in legal interpretation.

As we move forward, the legal profession should embrace ontology engineering as a crucial component of AI implementation. It's not just about making AI systems more accurate; it is about making them more trustworthy and aligned with the fundamental principles of legal practice.