Almost every lawyer now uses AI - but hallucination fears are growing

Almost every lawyer now uses AI for legal work, but concerns about the technology making things up have also risen significantly, according to a new survey.

LexisNexis found that 94% of UK legal professionals now use AI for legal work, up from just 41% two years ago.

One in ten lawyers surveyed said they were now dependent on AI to do their job, rising to 15% at large law firms and 13% among in-house lawyers.

The findings are based on a survey of 543 UK legal professionals.

The hallucination problem

More reliance on AI is being accompanied by concern about whether its outputs can be trusted.

Some 83% of lawyers said they are concerned about AI producing fabricated or inaccurate information, up from 57% two years ago. LexisNexis said hallucinations have remained lawyers' biggest concern about the technology since it began tracking the issue at the start of 2024.

Those worries come against a backdrop of high-profile AI errors involving top law firms this year.

Pinsent Masons was admonished by the High Court and self-reported to the SRA after a junior lawyer used AI to draft misleading letters in an insolvency case. In the US, Sullivan & Cromwell admitted this year that AI-generated errors had found their way into a bankruptcy court filing.

AI is creating more work

The findings also add weight to a growing theory about AI: that it could actually generate more work for lawyers, creating a kind of Jevons paradox for legal work.

More than three-quarters of respondents (77%) said AI was causing clients or the general public to misinterpret the law.

One associate at a large law firm blamed it on the tools available to lawyers and versus their clients.

“Clients only have access to general AI tools at the moment, not the tools with the right harness that they can actually rely on,” they told LexisNexis.

One large law firm leader went further, saying they had noticed a “huge increase in litigation, as claimants are able to harness AI to bring claims, not all of which will be meritorious.”