US Supreme Court's Roberts urges 'caution' as AI reshapes legal field

Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court stated in a year-end report released on Sunday that artificial intelligence provides a mixed blessing for the legal profession, advising “caution and humility” as the rapidly advancing technology changes the way judges and solicitors practise their profession.

Roberts’ 13-page report has a conflicted tone. While pointing out privacy issues and the limitations of existing technology in replicating human discretion, he said AI has the potential to revolutionise legal research, enhance access to justice for impoverished litigants, and help courts resolve disputes more swiftly and inexpensively.

“I predict that human judges will be around for a while,” Roberts wrote. “But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work – particularly at the trial level – will be significantly affected by AI.”

The chief justice’s commentary is his most significant discussion to date of the influence of AI on the law, and coincides with a number of lower courts contending with how best to adapt to a new technology capable of passing the bar exam but also prone to generating fictitious content, known as “hallucinations.”

Roberts emphasized that “any use of AI requires caution and humility.” He mentioned an instance where AI hallucinations had led lawyers to cite non-existent cases in court papers, which the chief justice said is “always a bad idea.” Roberts did not elaborate beyond saying the phenomenon “made headlines this year.”

Last week, for instance, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, said in court papers unsealed last week that he mistakenly gave his attorney fake case citations generated by an AI program that made their way into an official court filing. Other instances of lawyers including AI-hallucinated cases in legal briefs have also been documented.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans last moth drew headlines by unveiling what appeared to be the first proposed rule by any of the 13 US appeals courts aimed at regulating the use of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT by lawyers appearing before it.

The proposed rule by the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals would require lawyers to certify that they either did not rely on artificial intelligence programs to draft briefs or that humans reviewed the accuracy of any text generated by AI in their court filings.