Practical implications of ChatGPT for arbitration practitioners
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has captivated public imagination in recent weeks and months, a supposed ‘quantum leap’ in artificial intelligence (AI) for the everyday user. A chatbot that can not only answer complex and nuanced questions on a myriad of topics but also exhibit impressive creativity like writing songs and poetry. ChatGPT is the newest service from the Microsoft-funded OpenAI. But what is this technology beneath all of these eye-catching features? We can ask the model itself and set a limit of 50 words.
“ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text. It can be used for a variety of tasks such as conversation, language translation, and content creation.”
Large language models incorporate deep neural networks with a massive amount of parameters (ChatGPT’s underlying model has 175 billion parameters), to feed inputs through a multi-layered set of semantic associations to estimate the ‘right’ answer. ChatGPT builds on this structure by adding natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as contextual learning whereby the model retains the conversation and previous information it has received from the user to generate more accurate responses. Learn more about ChatGPT here.
How can ChatGPT be used in international arbitration?
What are the practical use cases of ChatGPT in arbitration?
Now being somewhat familiar with what ChatGPT is ‘under the hood’, the most important question for international arbitration practitioners is how might it benefit our work?
Let’s look at a number of generalised use cases and then discuss their potential utility for practitioners. Here are five promising applications of ChatGPT for arbitration lawyers and professionals:
Language translation: ChatGPT is well-suited to providing translated text at an accuracy that matches or exceeds other free tools like Google Translate, with the benefit of being able to fine-tune the model on where it has made errors.
Text summarisation: The model can be fed articles, essays and other longer documents and provide tailored summaries based on constraints set by the user (word count, inclusion/exclusion of certain aspects of the content etc.)
Text generation: The model can draft text of variable length and style on an infinite number of topics, and can be ‘taught’ about topics it is not familiar with. As alluded to above, some of the most eye-catching examples of this in the media have been poetry, songwriting and mimicry of famous individuals’ styles.
Question answering: As a chatbot, ChatGPT is specifically tailored towards this use case, but when answering on technical subjects it may not have been trained on, it may use its ‘imagination’ to estimate the right answer, and therefore describe things that have not happened or are not correct.
In the context of international arbitration, diverse language skills are always in high demand and thus the ability to gain access to high accuracy, and tuneable translations for free or for a low subscription amount (as part of any future paid ChatGPT plan) is valuable versus the cost of traditional services. The same value could further be derived from text summarisation processes, which would serve as an efficiency multiplier for junior and mid-level practitioners in legal research and the production of relevant case notes, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks within a dispute.
Can ChatGPT be used for legal drafting in arbitration?
Yes, but with important limitations:
It does not understand legal principles and cannot apply jurisdiction-specific law.
It can help create rough drafts or first-pass templates for memos and letters.
It lacks source citations, making it unreliable for legal research without human verification.
Pro tip: Use ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool or assistant—not a substitute for legal judgment.
In terms of assisting in legal drafting itself, ChatGPT is not trained to know legal principles or to apply them but it will estimate what it sees as a logical answer. Thus, ChatGPT could save time for a practitioner through its responses being used as a rough skeleton to draft within, but its utility would be limited beyond that.
Is ChatGPT better than Google for legal research?
Not yet. While ChatGPT can provide conversational answers, it does not cite sources or legal authorities. For arbitration professionals, this poses a risk of misinformation.
As mentioned above, ChatGPT is designed to react like an advanced chatbot and therefore seeks to provide highly accurate estimations of correct responses to users’ questions. However, because by its construction, the model is only using probabilities to produce the ‘right’ answer and does not cite its sources, ChatGPT should not be leveraged to assist practitioners in answering questions that the user themselves does not know the answer to.
Why it matters:
ChatGPT uses probabilities, not facts.
It may generate content that sounds accurate but is incorrect.
It’s better used for generating drafts or summarizing than for answering unknown legal questions.
What are ChatGPT’s advantages in document review and eDiscovery?
In conversation with Tim Harrison, Founder & CEO of Arkus Consulting, an independent eDiscovery service provider, I asked what he viewed as its most promising features and biggest drawbacks. Specifically for eDiscovery and document review tasks, Tim sees NLP models like the one within ChatGPT as the next step in improving efficiency and minimising human review in the years to come. However, due to the fact that ChatGPT produces responses on a heavily generalised (and unknown) dataset, it cannot yet be trusted to work in an unsupervised way. For the global disputes industry, the highest levels of certainty are usually required and therefore it may be quite a few years before we see this technology tailored for legal nuances.
For Tim, the promise of the technology does remain though, even in use cases beyond document search and review. Two hypotheses come to mind, the first being internal information governance for companies, whereby a NLP model is searching not only for rudimentary keywords and conceptual clusters in employees’ communications, but even analysing their sentiment and flagging issues in real-time. The second hypothesis relates to legal predictive analytics, and leveraging how these models might be able to quickly find and weight commonalities with prior disputes to forecast legal outcomes. This kind of use case would obviously represent a boon for third party funders and large international firms in how they would allocate funding and resources to individual disputes.
According to Tim Harrison, CEO of Arkus Consulting (eDiscovery specialists), ChatGPT-like models hold great promise:
Potential benefits:
Reduces time spent on basic document review
Flags key terms, concepts, and even sentiment in communications
May one day be integrated into internal compliance tools
However, Tim cautions that ChatGPT:
Is trained on general data, not legal-specific corpora
Cannot be trusted for unsupervised review
Needs further training for high-certainty legal work
Therefore, as it stands, ChatGPT may not yet be the revolutionary tool that gives arbitration practitioners superhuman productivity, but that point may be closer than we think. Many developers have already started to iterate on top of some of OpenAI’s many products, including ChatGPT, and we are already seeing useful API-based browser extensions and web applications. One of the most interesting of these is a web-enabled ChatGPT, which can use search engines to inform its responses and supplement search results. Versions of OpenAI’s GPT-3 model can already be accessed and trained on very specific datasets to create specialised use cases. We may very soon see models trained on case law of various jurisdictions that can produce relevant legal research almost instantly. The same may become possible for drafting, whereby models are trained using templates from a law firm’s previous disputes, and produce memos and pleadings in that style. As such, ChatGPT may just be the tip of the iceberg for AI-assisted working and the disruption of traditional legal practice.
What future use cases of ChatGPT could transform arbitration?
Here are two advanced applications currently being explored:
Internal information governance
AI models could monitor internal communications for compliance risks, sentiment shifts, or keyword triggers.Legal outcome prediction
Predictive analytics could analyze thousands of prior cases to estimate likely outcomes—valuable for third-party funders and case strategy.
What are the risks of using ChatGPT in arbitration?
Hallucination: The model can invent facts or cases that do not exist.
Lack of transparency: ChatGPT doesn’t explain how it arrived at an answer.
Jurisdictional mismatch: It doesn’t account for country-specific laws unless fine-tuned.
No confidentiality: ChatGPT should never be used to input sensitive case details unless within a secured environment.
Will ChatGPT revolutionize legal practice?
Not immediately—but it’s coming.
While current models have limitations, rapid development is underway:
Web-connected ChatGPTs already use live search data
Legal-specialized models trained on case law are emerging
API-based tools are being built to integrate into firm workflows
Soon, we may see:
Law firm-specific drafting tools
Instant legal research bots
AI tools that learn from internal precedents
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Can ChatGPT replace arbitration lawyers?
No. It’s a tool, not a replacement. It assists with tasks but lacks legal reasoning.
Is ChatGPT safe to use for confidential cases?
No. Unless deployed privately (e.g., via API on secure servers), it should not be used for confidential data.
Can ChatGPT summarize legal documents?
Yes. With the right input, it can generate effective summaries—but always verify the output.
Is ChatGPT accurate?
Partially. It’s great for general tasks, but not for facts or legal advice.
Interested in learning more about the effects of new technologies for international dispute resolution? Watch our discussion on the current state of crypto disputes here!
