Rules over words: Regulation of chatbots in the legal market and ethical considerations

The emergence and fast proliferation of chatbot solutions have reshaped how we interact with customer services, professionals and organizations providing advisory services. Law firms and legal professionals have also been affected by chatbots, which have become an integral part of the legal market. They are used for training, discovery, legal research and various other tasks by multinational law firms and sole practitioners alike. Besides their benefits, however, chatbot solutions also face a number of limitations and their use could raise both legal and ethical concerns. Unsupervised use of such solutions can lead to serious professional responsibility issues, while their use in certain cases, such as in cases involving acting as a defense counsel or advising on sensitive matters, can also raise ethical concerns, or endanger the trust in lawyers built by generations of legal professionals. The processing of certain data or confidential information can further raise privacy or confidentiality issues, especially with respect to the need for artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions to constantly rely on huge datasets. Bearing the above in mind, the regulation of chatbots in the legal market is certainly a complex topic with many challenges. In this paper, I provide an overview of the use of chatbots in the legal market, summarize the main concerns regarding their use (especially including professional liability, privacy and ethical concerns) and also highlight the main challenges concerning AI and chatbot regulation and the potential approaches regulators could follow to prevent or minimize risks associated with the unlawful or unethical use of technology and disperse unnecessary fears by also supporting technological development and by preserving the positive effects of the use of chatbots in the legal market.