Governing Legal Chatbots: Ethics, Professional Responsibility, and Liability in Comparative Perspective

Client intake, information retrieval, document assembly, and litigation assistance, among other legal functions, have seen deployment of Artificial Intelligence legal chatbots in legal care delivery. With substantial legal efficiency and access to justice improvements, these tools also pose major legal, ethical, and liability risks. Unlike other legal technologies, legal chatbots lie at the crossroads of the practice of law, consumer protection and automation; oversight of which can have negative legal consequences. This work looks at the legal, ethical and liability issues of legal chatbots in the EU, the USA and the UK. It contends that the existing governance approaches are sub-optimal to the unique challenges posed in these chatbots. It demonstrates the EU is gravitating to a compliance-and-liability regime through the Artificial Intelligence Act and revised Product Liability Directive, whereas the US and UK have a predominantly self-regulating professional quartet, with tort, and consumer protection law. This paper advocates for ‘accountability by design’ which contemplates design, deployment, and practice of law responsibility principles through the lifecycle of a chatbot.