Legal Advice Privilege and Artificial Legal Intelligence: Can Robots Give Privileged Legal Advice?

Stockdale, Michael and Mitchell, Rebecca (2019) Legal Advice Privilege and Artificial Legal Intelligence: Can Robots Give Privileged Legal Advice? The International Journal of Evidence & Proof, 23 (4). pp. 422-439. ISSN 1365-7127

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1365712719862296

Abstract

Legal professional privilege entitles parties to legal proceedings to object to disclosing communications. The form of legal professional privilege that is now commonly known as “legal advice privilege” attaches to communications between a client and its lawyers in connection with the provision of legal advice. The provision of legal advice increasingly involves the use of technology across a wide spectrum of activities with varying degrees of human interaction or supervision. Use of technology ranges from a lawyer conducting a keyword search of a legal database to legal advice given on-line by fully automated systems. With technology becoming more integrated into legal practice, an important issue that has not been explored is whether legal advice privilege attaches to communications between client and legal services provider regardless of the degree of human involvement and even if the “lawyer” might constitute a fully automated advice algorithm. In essence, our central research question is if a robot gives legal advice, is that advice privileged? This article makes an original and distinctive contribution to discourse in this area through offering novel perspectives on and solutions to a question which has not previously been investigated by legal academics.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Legal advice privilege, robot, legal technology, algorithms, professional regulation
Subjects: M200 Law by Topic
Department: Faculties > Business and Law > Northumbria Law School
Depositing User: Paul Burns
Date Deposited: 14 Jun 2019 13:36
Last Modified: 01 Aug 2021 10:32
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/39703

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