This chapter examines the effects that legally-oriented AI developments will have on consumer protection and to consumers’ need for legal advice and representation. The chapter provides a brief survey of the many possible ways in which AI may influence consumers’ legal needs. It provides comparative analysis of the benefits and risks of the use of AI in the legal sphere, discusses the state of regulation in this area and argues in favor of a new regulatory framework.

Privacy and public interest are reciprocal concepts, mutually implicated in each other’s protection. This chapter considers how viewing the concept of privacy through a public interest lens can reveal the limitations of the narrow conception of privacy currently inherent to much health research regulation (HRR). Moreover, it reveals how the public interest test, applied in that same regulation, might mitigate risks associated with a narrow conception of privacy.  The central contention of this chapter is that viewing privacy through the lens of public interest allows the law to bring into focus more things of common interest than privacy law currently recognises. We are not the first to recognise that members of society share a common interest in both privacy and health research. Nor are we the first to suggest that public is not necessarily in opposition to private, with public interests capable of accommodating private and vice versa. What is novel about our argument is the suggestion that we might invoke public interest requirements in current HRR to protect group privacy interests that might otherwise remain out of sight.