The digital revolution and law in the internet age

Whether it’s Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely divorcee falling in love with his operating system, Samantha, (played by Scarlett Johansson) in the film Her, IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, which can humble grandmasters, or Google’s AlphaGo beating international champion Lee Sedol at the ancient Chinese board game Go, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere and rapidly becoming a game-changer in many industries. But what is it and what does it mean for law and future lawyers? Will the predictions of Professor Richard Susskind, whose books foretells The End of Lawyers, come true or are their limits on how far technology can go to replace human practitioners?

Richard Tromans, adviser on legal AI technology and author of the Artificial Lawyer website, demystifies the technology. He explains that AI is a “family of technologies,” used in many fields across many sectors — from self-driving cars to image recognition systems and mechanical robotics, and now increasingly in the legal profession. Essentially, it is the theory and development of computer systems that perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.

The types of AI used in law, says Tromans, are primarily related to text, referred to as “natural language,” as opposed to programming commands, and the software developed to read the text is called “natural language processing” or NLP.

AI uses algorithms to read and analyze legal documents. For the uninitiated, an algorithm is basically just a list of rules to follow in order to solve a problem. Most AI systems, adds Tromans, have machine-learning capabilities that enable them to improve. “AI is not a robot, it’s not frightening and it does not spell the end of the legal profession. It is a very important development, but it’s a positive change that lawyers should embrace.”

“AI is not a robot, it’s not frightening and it does not spell the end of the legal profession. It is a very important development, but it’s a positive change that lawyers should embrace”Richard Tromans, author of the Artificial Lawyer website

Tromans answers: “Law is text — contracts, legislation, rulings, agreements, skeleton arguments, patents — everything is text. Anywhere there’s text you can use legal AI.” If you have a piece of software that can read, analyze and report on an entire document in a couple of minutes, instead of hours, it immediately replaces the work of many paralegals or junior lawyers, changing the way law firms have traditionally operated. “AI increases the speed by a factor of 1,000. I’ve seen a 40-page complex real estate document digested and analyzed in 30 seconds,” says Tromans. “Machines don’t get tired, ill or take days off. Plus, they can work in parallel and read more than one thing at a time. It is the equivalent of an entire building of lawyers, working at a speed that they would be incapable of, and more accurately than a human.”

Aside from reading documents and performing much of the tedious, but essential, due diligence work done by commercial lawyers, John Flood, professor of law and society at Griffith University, Australia, says AI can be used for compliance and, more interestingly, to determine the chances of success by assessing whether it is worth bringing a case in the first place. Professor Flood explains that programs can examine past cases and judgments on the same issues and look at the judges and lawyers involved to give a good prediction of the likely outcome.

The judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have been predicted to 79% accuracy using an AI method developed by researchers at University College London, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania in which the software analyzed the information and made its own judicial decision.

The AI ‘judge’ algorithm examined English-language data sets for 584 cases relating to torture and degrading treatment, fair trials and privacy, reaching the same verdicts as judges at the European Court of Human Rights in almost four in five cases.

The Discovery Analytics Centre at Virginia Tech has also come up with a system to model the US Supreme Court using computer-based machine learning. The team has devised a data-driven framework that learns justices’ judicial preferences. It can be used to answer questions about the justices’ voting behavior, for example: how will the justices vote in a case about a particular topic? Which coalitions are likely to become relevant? Who is likely to be the swing justice in a given case or term? The model created a reasonably accurate assessment of justices’ views on issues, predicted their alignments on cases and identified who might be a swing vote.

Chrissie Lightfoot, futurist, co-founder of Robot Lawyer LISA and author of the Naked Lawyer series of books, says not entirely: “Currently cognitive computing and most forms of AI require lots of data, so the service is limited to the machine pool of information and its quality and depth.”

Lightfoot continues: “Effectively, the quality of the output will be determined by the quality of the input. It is then limited by the requirement for someone, such as a lawyer, to reason and judge the output, based on human experience, knowledge and talent.”

But, while IT systems can currently only support lawyers, Lightfoot reckons that as machines become more intelligent, they may replace lawyers in some instances.

“Technology is limited by the requirement for someone to reason and judge the output, based on human experience, knowledge and talent”

Chrissie Lightfoot, Naked Lawyer Author

Professor Flood disagrees, saying there will always remain a need for human judgment in the legal process. AI, he says, works most effectively when used in conjunction with human lawyers. His point is demonstrated by a report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, from the US committee of the National Science and Technology Council.

The study focused on a scientific, rather than legal use. Given images of lymph node cells, and asked to determine whether or not the cells contained cancer, an AI-based approach had a 7.5% error rate, where a human pathologist had a 3.5% error rate. But when you combined the two, using both AI and human input, the error rate lowered to 0.5%, representing an 85% reduction in error.

While AI may reduce the number of lawyers required for a particular task and alter the nature of some of the work done by lawyers, law students of the future can rest assured that they can still have a legal career ahead of them — but perhaps partnership with a machine.—

ARTIFICIAL LAWYER WEBSITE

ECHR PREDICTION TRIAL

CHRISSIE LIGHTFOOT

Many former law students in Britain, the United States and other countries will remember lectures about how the deliberate committal of certain crimes needs to be proved by establishing the actus reus (guilty act) in conjunction with the mens rea (guilty mind). But how do you effectively do that in concrete circumstances?

Some law schools are turning to virtual reality (VR) to immerse students in potential crime scenes so they themselves can decide whether the established facts of the case match with the evidence requirements to prove a given offense. Is the way the accused parked his car an indication of an intent to launch an attack or a robbery? Look and see. How plausible is it that a witness could not distinguish between her roommate and an intruder at that time of night? Judge for yourself.

As well as VR, augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies can be combined to enhance the vision and, ultimately, the potential wisdom of legal actors.

“Imagine judges and juries wearing VR/AR/MR devices to immediately transport them to a crime scene so they can deeply view, inspect and review pieces of evidence during a trial”Dennis Garcia, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Corporation.

“When teams use VR/AR/MR, they can interact with each other in virtual spaces or virtual ‘warrooms’ to collaborate with each other without having to be all together in one physical location,” Garcia continues. “Such use scenarios can be very compelling when lawyers and business clients based in locations across the globe need to closely connect with each other on matters where time is of the essence, such as sensitive contract negotiations, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, crisis management, and so on.”

• The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services, by Professor Richard Susskind
• Inferring Multi-dimensional Ideal Points for US Supreme Court Justices
• National Science and Technology Council Report: Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence
• Artificial Intelligence in Law: The State of Play 2016

This material has been prepared for general informational purposes only. Some information has been compiled by third party sources that we consider to be reliable. However, we do not guarantee and are not responsible for the accuracy of such. The views of third parties set out in this publication are not necessarily the views of IE University and they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.