The Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Profession

The use of artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the legal profession more than ever before, altering the provision of legal services in terms of research, drafting, contract analysis, predictive analytics, and dispute resolution. Along with the scope and importance of this change, the current regulatory frameworks encompassing international governance tools, supranational laws, national laws, and the frameworks of professional bodies are structurally unsatisfactory to tackle the unique accountability, transparency, confidentiality, access to justice issues that AI creates in the legal environment. The paper contributes to the theoretical and conceptual reasoning about the regulatory issues of AI in the legal profession based on the regulatory theory, legal theory, and the new interdisciplinary research on AI regulation. The paper takes a critical look at the key uses of AI in legal practice, compares five regulatory domains with the particular needs of legal AI governance, and a conceptual model basing on four normative pillars: transparency, accountability, human oversight, and access to justice. The model is designed on the basis of a co-regulatory institutional framework that combines binding statutory standards with professional body skills and international harmonisation processes. The article claims that to regulate AI responsibly within the legal profession, it is necessary to find a purposeful reconceptualization of regulatory architecture that would be responsive to the technical realities of AI deployment but not lose sight of the foundational values of the legal profession and the rule of law.