Legal research is the process of locating, analyzing, and comparing legal authorities relevant to a legal question or matter.
Legal research involves reading case law and preceding decisions to identify relevant authorities, then drawing comparisons and contrasts between them. AI-based tools may help locate related cases and explain their similarities and differences. section 6.3
LLMs can support legal research by:
Finding decisions related to a legal question through document embeddings and similarity. section 6.3
Explaining similarities and differences between cases, beyond basic term-based search. section 6.3
Summarizing discovery documents or identifying materials that support a particular argument. section 6.3
How Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition covers it
How deep it goes
Explains case comparison, similarity-based retrieval, and document summaries, but stops short of prescribing a complete research workflow.
Examples
Uses preceding decisions, discovery documents, case comparisons, document summaries, and materials supporting a legal argument.
What you can do after
Evaluate/understand relevant decisions by comparing similarities and differences with potential AI assistance.
How it connects
Connects legal research to case law, discovery, e-discovery, document embeddings, similarity, and document drafting.
embeddingused by · A numerical vector representation of an item or input that encodes features or relationships useful for computational tasks.
language modelused by · A language model is a computational model that represents patterns in linguistic tokens to estimate sequence probabilities and predict or generate language from context.
This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.
