Generative Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice: Epistemic Expertise, Unethical AI, and the Role of Virtue

This paper discusses the impact of generative AI (genAI) on the legal profession and the importance of virtue ethics in addressing the epistemic and ethical challenges for legal practice posed by genAI technology. It traces the development of legal genAI, and argues that its functionality currently leaves it ethically lacking (relative to the dream of AI as a substitutive technology) in terms of its competence, integrity, and compliance with ethical standards. The paper further argues that genAI also fails to contribute to the more normative, non-principlist, ethical expectations that we associate with excellent practice. While it can perform well on certain well-defined tasks, it struggles with the nuances of real-world legal problem-solving, particularly complex relational problems where practical wisdom and contextual understanding play a significant role, over and above technical domain expertise. This is because the tools currently lack the capacity for moral discernment and the ability to autonomously reason either from first principles, or from virtue-based reasoning, both of which are significant for professional decision-making. It suggests that, without more, the deep deployment of genAI in legal practice may thus lead to a diminution of practical wisdom, rather than its augmentation or enhancement. The paper concludes with some recommendations on how the legal ecosystem might manage genAI adoption in ways that better enable AI tools and the lawyers using them to augment rather than diminish virtue.