Abstract

AI is transforming legal services delivery, access, and regulation. AI can improve justice system efficiency and responsiveness by automating mundane legal work, improving legal research through advanced data analytics, improving case administration, and enabling novel online legal service delivery. Courts, law firms, corporate legal departments, and legal aid organisations worldwide are using AI-driven solutions to handle expanding caseloads, decrease procedural delays, and lower legal fees. AI has great potential to improve justice in India, where judicial backlogs and little legal aid persist. AI's rising usage in law creates difficult legal, ethical, and professional issues. The legal profession's fundamental principles are threatened by algorithmic bias, openness of automated decision-making, client data protection, and accountability for AI-generated outcomes. Predictive analytics and automated legal tools raise challenges about how much technology can replace or limit human judgement and discretion. These considerations are especially important in a fair, due process, and professional responsibility-based legal system. This study critically investigates artificial intelligence in legal practise in three areas: efficiency, access to justice, and professional accountability. It examines how AI can spread legal services to marginalised groups using low-cost digital platforms, legal chatbots, and online dispute resolution. It also examines how over-reliance on automated systems may undermine professional autonomy, ethical accountability, and client trust. The study claims that AI has great potential to improve the legal system, but it must be regulated, ethically protected, and professionally supervised. A balanced and principled strategy is needed to use AI to empower rather than exclude, safeguarding legal practice's key ideals of justice, openness, and human judgement.

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