What's Inside the Black Box? AI Challenges for Lawyers and Researchers

The Artificial intelligence revolution is happening and is going to drastically re-shape legal research in both the private sector and academia. AI research tools present several advantages over traditional research methods. They allow for the analysis and review of large datasets ('Big Data') and can identify patterns that are imperceptible to human researchers. However, the wonders of AI legal research are not without perils. Because of their complexity, AI systems can escape the control and understanding of their operators and programmers. Therefore, especially when run by researchers with insufficient IT background, computational AI research may skew analyses or result in flawed research. Premised thus, the main goals of this paper, written by Ronald Yu and Gabriele Spina Al, are to analyse some of the factors that can jeopardize the reliability of AI-assisted legal research and to review some of the solutions to mitigate this situation.