Artificial Intelligence in Legal Services: State-Of-Art and Users' Expectations in Russia

Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a transformative effect on the business world. Among others, the legal services industry is susceptible to these transformations, but being a part of the legal system, it adopts novelties more slowly than other service-based industries. The issue of AI acceptance for legal services is widely discussed in Russia. The opportunities and threats of AI implementation are the subjects of academic research, business enquires, experts' assessments, and professional community discussions. Still, all those pieces of evidence are biased by the objectives of specific research and methodology used, mostly have no or little empirical data to ground their conclusions on. The absence of the empirical evidence of the state-of-the-art of AI in legal services and users’ expectations on AI implementation hinders further research in various topics – from legal firms’ management and legal innovations to the lawyering process and access to justice. This thesis addresses the problem above with the study employing survey methodology. The results of the survey (n=213) are consistent with the expert opinions regarding AI technologies and their implementations for legal services, suggesting the cooperation of lawyer and AI in legal service rendering rather than competition. Russian lawyers appear to have the experience of using very advanced AI solutions, including those that are unavailable directly on the Russian market. The expectations of lawyers as users of AI technologies could be described as uncertain, which means that further extension of the AI implementation is still a disputable issue