Artificial Intelligence in Legal Decision-Making: Power Without Accountability?

Artificial Intelligence in Legal Decision-Making: Power Without Accountability?

By Ashmitha Setty

 

The phrase power without accountability refers to the idea that AI might influence or determine legal outcomes without organisations or individuals being clearly responsible when things go wrong.

 

What Is AI in Legal Decision-Making:

AI in law is often powered by machine learning or large language models that assist with or influence legal tasks. 

These tasks can include:

  • Predictive analytics- like the likelihood of reoffending

  • Legal research and drafting

  • Risk assessments in criminal justice

  • Case outcome forecasting

  • Document analysis and automation

 

Key Benefits of AI in Law:

  • Efficiency: Legal research and document review can be completed faster than any human team.

  • Cost Reduction: Automated processes reduce labour costs and speed up routine tasks.

  • Consistency: AI may offer consistent outputs in areas where human judgment varies widely.

 

Why AI could be unreliable:

 

The ‘Black Box’ Problem:

AI models often lack transparency about how they derive their outputs, known as the black box problem.

  • Transparency: The internal logic of many AI systems is unknown, making it difficult to explain why a certain outcome was reached.

  • Challenges for Appeals: Without explainable reasoning, judges may struggle to challenge AI-informed decisions effectively.

 

Distributed Accountability and Legal Gaps:

  • AI systems cannot be held morally or legally responsible. This creates a ‘legal grey area’ in which accountability must be attributed among:

  • Developers who design and train the model

  • Vendors who deploy it

  • Legal professionals or institutions that rely on AI outputs

 

AI Bias and Fairness:

  • If data reflects biased legal outcomes, AI systems may reproduce or even intensify these biases.

  • Without clear accountability mechanisms, victims of biased AI outputs may lack recourse.

This threatens equity in legal decision-making and challenges the legitimacy of AI-assisted justice.

 

Ethical and Legal Concerns:


Dehumanisation:

  • AI lacks empathy, cultural awareness, and ethical nuance- qualities essential in legal judgments.

  • Relying too heavily on AI may risk overlooking human values and context in legal reasoning.


Rule of Law Impacts:

  • The opacity and bias of AI systems raise concerns about undermining core rule-of-law principles, such as equality before the law and access to fair procedures when decisions cannot be fully explained.

 

Possible Solutions:

Regulatory Frameworks:

  • Emerging legal standards, such as the EU’s AI Act, propose risk-based regulation for high-impact AI.

  • These frameworks seek to impose transparency and oversight requirements- but implementation and enforcement remain work in progress.


Human Oversight:

  • Experts widely agree that AI should be assistive, not autonomous, in legal decisions.

  • Human professionals must remain in the accountability chain, evaluating, verifying, and owning the ultimate decision.

 

Real-World Legal Challenges:

Case Study: Misuse of AI-Generated Case Law in UK Courts (2025)

Background:

  • In 2025, the High Court of England and Wales confronted a serious issue where lawyers submitted fake legal authorities that had no basis in real case law- and these were traced to AI used without proper verification.

 

What Happened:

  • Two separate legal proceedings revealed that parties had cited multiple non-existent legal cases in written submissions:

  • In a £90 million commercial dispute involving Qatar National Bank, one lawyer’s filing included 18 fictitious cases as part of their argument.

  • In a housing claim against the London Borough of Haringey, the claimant’s submission included five fake authorities.

  • Judges strongly suspected that these invented cases were the result of unchecked AI use.



Response from Senior High Court:

  • Lawyers could face sanctions, including contempt of court or even criminal charges such as perverting the course of justice for knowingly presenting false legal material.

  • Simply relying on AI outputs without verification does not excuse mistakes- legal professionals are ethically and legally responsible for ensuring that everything presented to a court is accurate.

 

Accountability Issues:

  • Hallucination:  AI sometimes invent plausible sounding but entirely fabricated information because they generate text based on probability rather than verified sources.

  • Lack of Clear Regulation: There were no statutory rules at the time on how lawyers should or shouldn’t use AI for legal research, meaning lawyers were left to rely on ethical guidelines rather than legal rules.

  • Responsibility: lawyers were held responsible for what was presented to the court.


Outcome:

  • While no criminal convictions, we can infer that:

  • Legal professionals must verify all AI-assisted outputs before presenting them.

  • Guidance and stricter enforcement mechanisms are needed to prevent further misuse.

 

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