Don't waste money on paid AI where no-cost versions will do, leading academic warns
Many law firms are paying hefty subscriptions for AI tools when free or low-cost alternatives could meet their needs just as well, says Robert Diab, a professor at the Faculty of Law of Thompson Rivers University.
While premium platforms promise advanced legal research capabilities, he says, many free versions have significantly improved their accuracy and functionality.
“Before small law firms commit to paying for bespoke legal AI, they should give the free, or almost free, tools a serious closer look,” he says. “They can already do quite a lot of what a proprietary, expensive legal AI tool will do.”
For smaller firms, these free tools offer an opportunity to improve research and workflow without additional costs, he adds.
“Before you jump to the conclusion that you should pay $500 to $1,000 a month for an expensive tool … you really should look at what free tools can do… If you don’t have a big legal research budget, free AI could be a game-changer,” he adds.
Many lawyers still think generative AI is unreliable for legal research due to early issues with hallucinations, Diab says and adds that these tools have improved significantly since the early days.
“The biggest misconception is that it's completely useless for Canadian legal research because most of what's going to come out of it will be hallucination… All of that was true only in the first few months.”
While some errors persist, the tools are much more refined than when they first launched, he adds.
“AI still does hallucinate, but to a far lesser extent. It’s consistently capable of providing fairly useful summaries of an area of law that may be new to a lawyer,” he adds.
What AI can’t do, he says, is reliably retrieve case law or specific rulings on a nuanced legal issue. He adds that AI is still translating queries into Boolean searches, running those searches, and then summarizing random results.
“It’s not actually reading the cases… and that is why it’s not the ideal tool for deep legal research – yet,” he says.
For firms that do not have the resources to invest in expensive AI-powered research tools, free AI can provide valuable assistance in legal research, Diab says.
First, it can help lawyers come up with Boolean search strings, making legal database searches less time consuming and more precise.
Second, AI tools can summarize cases and help lawyers grasp the key points of lengthy legal decisions faster.
Finally, he says, free AI can provide structured overviews of legal concepts, which is particularly useful for junior lawyers and those unfamiliar with specific areas of law.
“It can help a beginner lawyer come up with Boolean strings that they wouldn’t otherwise, that would take years to learn how to do on their own,” he adds.
However, he says that AI should be used as a support tool rather than a replacement for human judgment. “There’s always a verification process. No lawyer should rely on AI output without confirming its accuracy,” he adds.
Diab says that the next wave of AI advancements will further streamline legal research. Next-generation AI-powered legal search tools could enable AI to not only retrieve legal sources but also analyze them in detail, he says.
“I think in the next six months … [OpenAI’s] Deep Research will likely announce that it can access CanLII, JSTOR, PubMed and similar databases, and when it does, that’s going to be a game-changer,” Diab says.
These tools will make it possible to run complex legal research queries and have AI summarize key findings from multiple cases, he says.
“You’ll be able to go on to Deep Research and say, ‘Go on CanLII and find me a case that says X.’ It will not only execute the query but actually read the cases for you… That is the last mile and the most crucial, time-intensive part of legal research,” he says.
