From Process to Evidence: How Computing Can Ground Appropriate Reliance on Legal AI

Abstract

Lawyers and self-represented litigants are already using artificial intelligence (AI) to draft legal documents, and courts are responding with rules. After more than 1,500 cases involving AI hallucinations, lawyers have been instructed to perform careful, independent review of AI-assisted filings. Discharging these duties requires what the human-computer interaction (HCI) literature calls ``appropriate reliance,''which cannot be calibrated without evidence on how often, how badly, and how detectably these tools fail at legal work. Existing research barely describes any of the three. We analyze the official record of the New York court system. The documents repeatedly call for evidence that does not exist (e.g., error rates, do-not-use lists). In its place they invoke procedure, including training mandates, checklists, and uncalibrated human review. The burden falls hardest on those least equipped to bear it: legal aid programs are told to track their own error rates, and judges are left to improvise their own tests. The paper makes four contributions: (1) a mapping from the legal duties to concepts in HCI; (2) a set of requirements elicited from the official record; (3) an analysis of how the legal system substitutes process for evidence; and (4) a research agenda for computing, including task taxonomies, shared error metrics, maintained benchmarks, and test harnesses for evaluations on private data. The computing community must supply what the justice system lacks; in doing so, it can help close, rather than widen, the justice gap.