WHEN CAN AN LLM BECOME A RELIABLE PARTNER TO A LAWYER? STATISTICAL LANGUAGE COMPETENCE, LEGAL REASONING, AND HUMAN OVERSIGHT
WHEN CAN AN LLM BECOME A RELIABLE PARTNER TO A LAWYER? STATISTICAL LANGUAGE COMPETENCE, LEGAL REASONING, AND HUMAN OVERSIGHT

Summary/Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate legally fluent text, summarize legal materials and identify patterns in judicial and regulatory documents, but such linguistic performance should not be confused with legal understanding. In this paper, the authors do not reject the use of LLMs in legal work but examine the conditions under which the LLMs’ benefits may be responsibly used in legal practice. The paper distinguishes surface-level linguistic competence from genuine legal understanding and proposes a hybrid model that combines LLMs with structured legal NLP, source-grounded retrieval, audit trails and human-in-the-loop validation. It concludes that LLMs may become reliable partners to lawyers only when their outputs remain verifiable, explainable and subject to final human oversight and legal responsibility.

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