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With AI fast becoming part of everyday legal work, an employment lawyer has warned the profession to be prepared to explain its role when the stakes are highest.
In a recent podcast of The Legal Brief, Jerome Doraisamy was joined by Kingston Reid’s partner, Michael Stutley, to talk about the growing roles of AI in workplace decision making, investigations and people management.
Stutley noted how organisations can make the most of AI without handing over the human judgement that remains critical to legal decisions.
Spanning internal inquiries and general protection matters to automated bias, privacy considerations, and confidential staff data, the discussion highlighted where artificial intelligence provides value and where prudence remains essential.
AI, human judgement and workplace law
AI is increasingly becoming a strong part of legal and overall workplace processes, however Stutley explained that its role should only support and not replace human judgement.
“Where we need to be cautious is this shift in or movement between using it as an administrative assistant or an assistant to get through large volumes of documents or materials and understanding quickly the state of play to outsourcing entirely your judgement or delegating tasks to AI to complete without any human oversight,” Stutley said.
“There should be a human in the loop at every stage when you're using AI.
“And the reason you need a human in the loop is because you need to be able to withstand external scrutiny later on when it comes to the use of any of the AI responses.
“AI as a decision maker is one of the topics I think that is going to have increased attention going forward and it's particularly going to play out in the courts.”
The legal implications become particularly evident when AI is used in sensitive workplace processes, where employers still need to be able to demonstrate how and why a decision was made.
“If you have outsourced this entirely to AI and AI has come up with a decision and it has used its judgement, who is the decision maker and how can you possibly discharge that reverse onus if you don't have the human decision maker giving evidence about what was in their minds at the time?”
The risk behind AI
Along with the numerous opportunities, AI does bring an abundance of significant risks, especially in regards to trusting its answers and dealing with sensitive workplace information, Stutley alluded.
“It's really new versions of old risks rather than entirely new legal risks. And it's a lot of things that existed,” Stutley said.
“The problem with that is that if you rely on it as being the truth without verifying... then the problem is you're going to misplace your trust.
“The one question that I always ask is not what did the AI tell you?
“What information did you give the AI? Because that's the critical distinction here.”
To mitigate these exposure points, organisations must establish explicit guidelines governing acceptable AI usage and the boundaries of data sharing.
“You really need to have established governance rules, there needs to be an understanding, a policy across an organisation about what is the acceptable use of AI,” Stutley said.
“It doesn't need to be detailed, but it does need to be an understanding, a policy across an organisation about what is the acceptable use of AI, what are the approved systems that we are going to use?”
