Summary: The future of the legal industry is already seeing the influence of artificial intelligence in law firms but they may start popping up in the courtrooms as judges.
Get ready for the takeover of the robots! Not only can they fulfill some of the same duties as attorneys but they may start filling some of the duties of judges. Robots can not only help in your legal defense but they can send you to jail as well.
Scientists and engineers have developed a software program that is able to sift through legal documents to determine the most likely outcome of a trial. The artificially intelligent algorithm was developed by British scientists at University College London.
Read Presence of Robots in Legal Industry Growing.
UCL taught the program to understand legalese by providing it with previous human rights cases. In 600 human rights, privacy, torture, and fair trials, the program came to the same conclusion as the human judges in 79 percent of the cases.
Lead researcher of the project Dr. Nikolas Aletras is here to calm your fears, “We don’t see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they’d find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes. It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are more likely to be violations of the European convention on human rights.”
See Stanford Student’s “Robot Lawyer” Fights Parking Tickets in Seattle.
The thought is the software can help expedite trials and the vast amount of work that goes into them for judges. The reality of AI judges replacing real judges is not in the near future.
Do you think there will be a big shift in how legal work is done in the next ten, twenty years? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
To learn more about the use of artificial intelligence in law firms, read BakerHostetler Hires AI Attorney to Get the Job Done.
Photo: simplystenoblog.com