Bachelor's Thesis Michael Bonacina
Evaluation of the Current State of Legal AI Use Cases
Since the launch of ChatGPT more than three years ago, the interest in Legal AI and the number of potential use cases for which AI is imagined to be applied in the legal field has skyrocketed. Nonetheless, previous editions of the Legal AI Use Case Radar show that adoption among legal professionals is not ubiquitous yet.
The thesis aims to better understand what the current state of adoption is in terms of perceived usefulness and risk of AI for the different use cases identified by the Legal AI Use Case Radar and which additional use cases might have become possible since last year’s edition. Moreover, it will investigate to what extent differences between different legal domains exist. Additionally, the process of evaluating legal AI software by legal professionals, challenges when it comes to adopting legal AI tools and how deeply these tools are integrated into the different workflows (experimentation stage vs essential tool) as well as the expected trends in the foreseeable future will be a focus area. This analysis will be done through a series of semi-structured interviews with legal professionals in the private sector, such as lawyers in small and large law firms as well as lawyers in legal departments of corporations and legal professionals in the public sector such as judges or other public officials. In addition to these semi-structured interviews, the data collection will be supplemented by a survey for legal professionals where they can rate relevance and risks for different legal AI use cases.
In order to further improve AI for legal use cases, extensive academic research is done in the field which is exemplified by the fact that an analysis in the Legal AI Use Case Radar that looked at the number of papers focused on legal AI saw exponential growth since around 2020 with the count of papers published in 2024 being the highest number ever. Therefore another goal of the proposed thesis is to better understand what use cases academic research is focused on and where there might be a mismatch between academic research and relevance for practitioners or where this could be indicative of what developments might happen in the future in the realm of legal AI use cases. This will be done through an AI-driven systematic literature review which will look at all recent papers in the field and classify them by use cases.
Lastly, the thesis will examine for which use cases startups and established software providers in the legal AI space create offerings for legal professionals. Semi-structured interviews with employees of these companies will be used to uncover their perception of the relevance and risks associated with the different legal AI use cases as well as challenges in adoption they see with their clients and developments they see happening.
Through the combination of the lenses of legal practitioners, academic research and industry participants, the proposed thesis aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of legal AI use cases by quantifying adoption of legal AI, surfacing shared stories of successes, failures or challenges, and providing an outlook on the future direction of the field.
Research Questions:
RQ1: For which use cases are German legal professionals using AI and how does it differ by legal domain?
RQ2: On which legal AI use cases is academic research focused?
RQ3: On which legal AI use cases are startups and incumbent tech companies focused?
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Title (de) | Bewertung des aktuellen Stands der rechtlichen KI-Anwendungsfälle |
| Title (en) | Evaluation of the Current State of Legal AI Use Cases |
| Project | |
| Type | Bachelor's Thesis |
| Status | started |
| Student | Michael Bonacina |
| Advisor | Oliver Wardas , Stephen Meisenbacher |
| Supervisor | Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes |
| Start Date | 02.02.2026 |
| Sebis Contributor Agreement signed on | |
| Checklist filled | No |
| Submission date | 02.06.2026 |