Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a buzzword. It’s already transforming the way legal professionals operate. From contract review and dispute resolution to legal education, AI offers the potential to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and unlock new opportunities. However, AI also presents challenges that require thoughtful management. Lawyers must integrate these tools strategically to maintain the ethics, trust, and nuanced judgment that define the legal profession.
In this evolving landscape, success lies in finding the right balance: AI must enhance human expertise, not replace it. The key is to harness AI for what it does best—analyzing data and automating processes—while ensuring that the core values of legal practice remain intact.
Unlocking Efficiency Without Sacrificing Client Trust
AI offers law firms a way to reduce the time and effort spent on repetitive tasks, such as contract review, compliance monitoring, and due diligence. These tools can quickly sift through large datasets and identify patterns, giving lawyers the freedom to focus on complex, high-value work that requires legal judgment and strategy. But automation alone isn’t enough; client trust must remain at the heart of every legal service.
Integrating AI into legal workflows introduces new risks, particularly around data privacy and cybersecurity. As firms rely more on AI systems, they need robust governance frameworks to ensure client confidentiality and compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. AI can enhance productivity, but it should not create new vulnerabilities—legal professionals must maintain oversight and accountability over the tools they use. Rushing into AI adoption without a thoroughly considered governance structure could risk eroding the trust that is essential to the attorney-client relationship.
Arbitration and Litigation: Efficiency With Human Judgment
AI is also making waves in arbitration and dispute resolution, where it offers opportunities to streamline smaller claims. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts can automate decisions, while machine learning tools are being used to draft first-cut awards and analyze patterns from previous cases. These technologies hold great promise for making dispute resolution faster and more accessible, especially for routine matters.
However, high-value and novel disputes require more than automation—they demand human judgment to navigate the complexities and nuances that AI alone cannot address. Current AI models are essentially highly sophisticated statistical machines that operate on past data. Neutrality and fairness remain critical, especially in cross-border disputes, where cultural and demographic biases embedded in AI tools can affect outcomes. These biases pose a challenge in ensuring impartiality, especially in cases that require sensitivity to different legal systems and contexts. These same biases exist in terms of the legal application and interpretation, which will only evolve with humans that can critically assess novel claims.
The future of international arbitration and high-stakes complex disputes will likely involve hybrid models, where AI handles routine administrative tasks and early case management, but human arbitrators and judges make the final decisions. This approach combines the efficiency of AI with the nuanced judgment that only experienced professionals can provide, ensuring fairness throughout the process.
Preparing the Next Generation of Lawyers
As AI becomes an integral part of legal practice, law schools must adapt to prepare students for a hybrid profession. AI literacy is now as essential as traditional legal knowledge. At Barry University School of Law, students are trained to use AI-powered platforms like Casetext and Lexis+ effectively, but they are also taught to recognize when not to rely on these tools.
The goal is to ensure that future lawyers see AI as a tool, not a crutch. They must develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential in cases involving novel legal questions—areas where AI struggles to provide meaningful insights. Additionally, the growing demand for legal technologists and AI compliance officers means that students with expertise in both law and technology will have a competitive edge. Technology can enhance legal practice, but it cannot replace the creativity and empathy required in legal work. Lawyers who learn to collaborate with AI will maintain the human connection that clients expect while benefiting from technology’s efficiencies.
Striking the Right Balance for the Future
The legal profession stands at a crossroads. AI offers unprecedented opportunities to improve efficiency, but it also introduces challenges that must be carefully managed. Whether in corporate law, arbitration, or education, the key to success lies in finding the right balance between innovation and human expertise.
As firms adopt AI tools, they must remain committed to ethical standards, transparency, and trust. In arbitration, technology can enhance speed and accessibility, but human arbitrators will continue to play a critical role in ensuring fairness. In education, future lawyers must learn to navigate a world where AI and human expertise coexist, ensuring they are prepared to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving profession.
The success of the legal profession in the AI era will depend on how effectively it harnesses technology to support—not replace—human expertise. Those who strike the right balance will thrive in this new landscape, offering clients the best of both worlds: efficiency and insight, innovation and integrity.
Maryam Meseha and Tiffany Comprés, are co-founding partners at Pierson Ferdinand. Dawn Marin Dell is head of technical services and a member of the law library faculty at Barry University.
