Societies of Legal Minds: A Lens on AI

Marc Lauritsen | We may not welcome artificial minds into our law societies, but they will grace our workplaces.
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We may not welcome artificial minds into law societies, but they will grace our workplaces.

Like other humans, lawyers are fundamentally social, inside and out, physically and mentally. We contain multitudes and live within multitudes. Law itself is a socially produced way of regulating social behavior. So let’s apply a sociological lens to our accelerating encounters with artificial intelligence and consider the societies of legal minds.

The Inner Society

In “The Society of Mind” (1986) Marvin Minsky theorized that natural intelligence arises from interactions of mindless parts. He wrote, “What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.”

Generative AI systems remain mindless, yet they exhibit astonishing linguistic proficiency and other skills. They largely rely on deep learning, eschewing good old-fashioned symbolic methods, and lack explicit world models. As Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis argued in “Rebooting AI” (2019), such a monoculture limits their potential. Progress may require combining connectionist approaches with traditional knowledge-encoding in so-called neuro-symbolic systems.

What about in law? Optimally helpful generative AI systems are unlikely to emerge without symbolic scaffolding in contexts such as the following:

• Generating and critiquing arguments.
• Eliciting, understanding, and telling stories.
• Handling ambiguity and metaphor.
• Facilitating authentic human choices.
• Formulating strategies.

Artificial personalities will need a village of cognitive and emotional competencies to be maximally useful in law — including artificial curiosity and mechanical humility. Educability and neuroplasticity also seem essential.

At the same time, there are plenty of human “features” best not replicated, such as fanaticism, malevolence, bias, forgetfulness, distraction and other vulnerabilities.

The Outer Society

What will life be like with societies of artificial helpmates in the legal workplace?

We already have a new “attribution error” in which humans experience artificial systems that display linguistic prowess as intelligent personalities. Will we be interacting with multiple generic personalities or ones we’ve come to know (and that have come to know us)?

Legal work may require managing hordes of such agents. Our new apprentices will be experientially learning on the job alongside us.

We may not welcome artificial minds into our law societies (even if they manage to satisfy character and fitness standards, not just pass bar exams), but they will grace our workplaces. They may well be excellent assistants and colleagues, as they both substitute for us in some contexts and augment us in others.

AI will increasingly substitute for lawyers in consumer, small-business and unrepresented litigant scenarios, and it will both substitute for and augment lawyers in work where they are still needed and wanted.

Educating Mindful Legal Practitioners

I’ve long extolled the pedagogical value of trying to build a legal mind, for example, in maker-style courses where students create apps that help someone do legal work. (See this Stanford Law talk on learning law by teaching machines how to think like lawyers.)

Most lawyers are unlikely to build their own synthetic sidekicks. But they will increasingly need skills such as:

• How to select and manage AIs (tech selection can be highly social).
• When to delegate what to a mechanical assistant.
• Which “taps” to open when you have a lot of “running” knowledge inputs.
• Whether to be a teacher or a puppeteer.

A brooding omnipresence of artificial intelligences will not just transform the legal workplace. It will also open new opportunities to extend access to justice and legal wellness to the vast part of humanity presently excluded from them. But we’re still in the early stages in terms of system quality, educational institution support and regulatory readiness. As in society more generally.

Editor’s note: This piece began as a talk at the 2024 Conference of the International Future of Law Association.

Image © iStockPhoto.com.