Increasingly, legal practitioners are using artificial intelligence (AI) to review documents for relevant information, formulating searches of case law and statutes, as well as document analysis. While using AI for some aspects of legal writing, such as proofreading, error correction and document organization may be acceptable, AI use for legal writing and other purposes may be a violation of the legal ethical rules.

AI is a form of computer use. Both traditional computer use and AI computer use require software controlled by algorithms. Algorithms are problem solving processes memorialized in a set of step-by-step list of instructions telling a computer what to do. The fundamental difference with AI-directed computers and traditional-directed computers is that an AI can change its algorithms (and hence its outputs) based on new inputs, while traditional, algorithm-driven computers are fixed.