  Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a future in which certain types of legal
documents may be generated automatically. This has a great potential to
streamline legal processes, lower the cost of legal services, and dramatically
increase access to justice. While many researchers focus their efforts on
proposing and evaluating LLM-based applications supporting tasks in the legal
domain, there is a notable lack of investigations into how legal professionals
perceive content if they believe it has been generated by an LLM. Yet, this is
a critical point as over-reliance or unfounded skepticism may influence whether
such documents bring about appropriate legal consequences. This study is the
necessary analysis in the context of the ongoing transition towards mature
generative AI systems. Specifically, we examined whether the perception of
legal documents' by lawyers (n=75) varies based on their assumed origin
(human-crafted vs AI-generated). The participants evaluated the documents
focusing on their correctness and language quality. Our analysis revealed a
clear preference for documents perceived as crafted by a human over those
believed to be generated by AI. At the same time, most of the participants are
expecting the future in which documents will be generated automatically. These
findings could be leveraged by legal practitioners, policy makers and
legislators to implement and adopt legal document generation technology
responsibly, and to fuel the necessary discussions into how legal processes
should be updated to reflect the recent technological developments.
