Ethical and Responsible AI in the Legal Sphere and Beyond: Key Insights from the AIEI Event

On June 30, 2026, the International AI Ethics and Integrity Association (AIEI) held an online event, “Ethical and Responsible AI in the Legal Sphere and Beyond”. It addressed the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into professional legal practice. The event served as a platform for industry leaders to discuss the tension between rapid technological innovation and the necessity for ethical oversight.

Opening Words

The event was opened by AIEI President Sergiy Barbashin, a lawyer specializing in IP, IT, and AI law. In a brief introduction, he shared statistics that set the tone for the discussion: global AI spending this year has exceeded $2.5 trillion. It is a trillion more than last year, and several times higher than overall IT spending growth. According to him, more than half of the world’s population already uses AI, and its adoption is outpacing even the internet and personal computers at a comparable stage. At the same time, surveys reveal a trust gap: 73% of professionals working with AI report a positive impact on their skills, while 23% still do not trust it. As he noted, this gap was the very reason the association was founded.

He also spoke about AIEI’s ongoing activities. Among them are updated international AI principles (with an accompanying explanatory book to be published soon), the launch of an AI compliance assessment platform (currently in test mode), a new issue of the Horizon Journal. In addition, Sergiy Barbashyn mentioned work of the legal committee, which has already received applications from representatives of more than 22 countries.

Taras Lytovchenko: AI in the everyday legal work of in-house legal departments 

The first speaker was Taras Lytovchenko, Chair of AIEI’s Legal Committee and Chief Legal and Compliance Officer at Trinetix. He shared practical experience from implementing AI within an in-house legal team. 

His core message is that AI will not replace lawyers anytime soon, but lawyers who ignore AI adoption will be replaced by those who use it well. According to the statistics he presented, nearly 90% of legal professionals already use AI to some extent, yet only 23% report deriving real value from it.

At Trinetix, adoption began not with choosing a tool but with building clear processes, including playbooks, internal standards, and only then automation. Solutions already in place include an automated agreement-signing system for standard contracts (NDAs, employment agreements, etc.), an internal bot answering compliance policy questions, a legislative and regulatory monitoring tool, and an AI-assisted contract intelligence tool. All of them were built fully on-premise, with no data leaving the company. For general-purpose AI tools, the company enforces a strict policy: no confidential or personal data is ever entered into them.

Taras emphasized that the biggest problem is not AI hallucination, but the fact that some lawyers tend to trust AI output too much without proper verification. Eventually, as options for solo practitioners and small teams, he recommended limiting oneself to a few trusted tools (such as Claude, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM). As mentioned by Taras, using these tools with paid subscriptions will guarantee input data is not used for training or retained.

Roba Hamam: Launching legal StartUps

Roba Hamam, Deputy Chair AIEI’s Legal Committee, Partner and Legal Director at AÏP Genius, spoke about the journey of building a legal tech startup focused on intellectual property. Her central point is that building trustworthy legal AI is not about better algorithms. On the contrary, it’s about building infrastructure that people can actually trust.

She addressed several common misconceptions about AI in law. The most common are that the technology does not “know the law” in a legal sense, accuracy alone is never sufficient (context, ethics, and judgment are also required) and the transparency of AI systems can and should be ensured through audit logs and documented decision-making. According to Roba Hamam, a legal AI startup sits at the intersection of four elements: legal duties, technology, market trust and the startup itself. At AIP Genius, this is realized through a “human in the loop” principle treated not as a checkbox but as a way of making decisions. This is when the team defines what AI can support and what must always remain the responsibility of a lawyer, with every decision documented for accountability.

Dr. Edvinas Meškys: AI in law firms – challenges and opportunities 

Dr. Edvinas Meškys, Deputy Chair AIEI’s Legal Committee, Partner at VILYS, MEŠKYS & PARTNERS, presented the perspective of a law firm and its business model. He noted that the first wave of AI adoption, including research, summarization, drafting, translation, is already behind us. Today’s competitive advantage lies not in access to technology but in the ability to integrate it effectively.

Edvinas outlined a number of challenges facing legal businesses. One of the most common is pressure on traditional hourly billing (as clients increasingly prepare drafts themselves with AI and ask only for review). Another challenge is the “junior lawyer crisis” (since the routine work junior lawyers traditionally learned from is now automated). Additionally, there are growing confidentiality risks stemming from employee behavior rather than hacking and the rise of deepfake-related fraud. In his view, AI does not reduce a lawyer’s professional liability, it increases it, since the lawyer remains responsible for the outcome regardless of whether it was generated by technology.

Looking ahead, he predicted a shift from hourly billing toward fixed fees and subscription models. Furthermore, value placed on judgment, negotiation, strategic thinking, risk allocation, and trust will continue growing. The reason is that clients will continue to pay for these things even once drafting itself becomes free thanks to AI. 

We would like to thank our speakers Taras Lytovchenko, Roba Hamam and Edvinas Meškys for their insightful presentations as well as for their thoughtful answers to the audience’s questions. We are already looking forward to continuing this conversation and invite you to join us for our upcoming series of events this autumn. If you have ideas or topics you’d like us to cover at future events, we’d love to hear from you. Please share your suggestions through this form: https://forms.gle/9JTqwYdBYvsCvYrt9