Rebuilding 'ethics' to govern AI: How to re-set the boundaries for the legal sector?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming the legal sector and profession given every day enhancing AI-driven legal tech tools. Considering the far-reaching ethical implications of such tools and the disparate functionalities of 'AI ethics' and 'legal ethics', this paper puts into question the interplay between these ethical domains and their underlying rules. After fleshing out the governance of ethics under each domain, e.g. respectively professional conduct rules and self-regulatory principles, and signposting the unresolved ethical challenges of status quo, e.g. particularly concerning cross-domain issues, the paper discusses how they need to interact, based on the three policy options: 'revision of the conduct rules', 'individual (company level) collaboration' and 'higher-level collaboration'. It is concluded that 'higher-level collaboration' between the stakeholders is found to be the most sustainable and long-term option given the need to mitigate the ethical challenges concerning the legal sector from a holistic point of view.