Robots as lawyers. Will AI defend you or can you trust it?

 AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a lawyers? It might horrify some and some may get pleased by that idea. AI software can be used to quickly travel through and sort vast quantities of case documents.

First of all, How accurate AI is?

AI achieves incredible accuracy through deep neural networks. For example, your conversations with Alexa and Google are all based on deep learning. AI models achieves 95% accuracy!

According to a research done by University Hospital Birmingham, the results delivered by AI systems detected diseases correctly 87% of the time - compared with 86% for human professional and correctly gave the all-clear 93% of the time, compared with 91% for human experts.

Modern AI is capable of wonders. It can produce breathtaking original content, poetry, prose, images, music, human faces. It can diagnose some medical conditions more accurately than human physicians. 

For law:

As I said some are pleased because of AI sorting capability.

One such thing is Sally Hobson, a barrister at London-based law firm and is in a group of 36, who works on criminal cases. She used AI in complex murder trial. The case involved needing to quickly analyze more than 10,000 documents. The software completed the task four weeks earlier that it would have taken humans, saving ₤50,000 in the process. 

300+ other law firms in 55 countries also use it working in 80 languages.

Ms. Eleanor Weaver, chief executive of Luminance, which makes the software Ms. Hobson uses says "Lawyers using AI for assistance is becoming a norm and no longer a nice thing to have".

"Historically you had a lot of [document checking] technologies that were no better that keyword searches, like hitting Control-F on your laptop" too says Mr. Weaver/ In contrast, she says that today sophisticated software can connect associated words and phrases.

 AI however is not helping lawyers sort through documentary evidence. It can also now help them prepare and structure their case, and search for any relevant legal precedents.

Prof. Richard Susskind says that in 1980s he was genuinely horrified by the idea of a computer judge, but that he isn't now.

He pointed out that before COVID-19, "Brazil had a court backlog of more than 100million court cases, and that there is no chance of human judges and lawyers disposing of a caseload of that size.

So if an AI system can very accurately (say with 95% probability) predict the outcome of court decision, Prof. Susskind says that maybe we might start thinking about treating these predictions as binding determinations, especially in countries that have impossibly large backlogs.

DoNotPay!

One of the most important thing for a lawyer to must have is communication skills both oral and written. Lawyers speak with fluency efficiently and effectively.

 Well, there is an AI software capable of doing it as well. 

Joshua Browder describes his app DoNotPay as "the world's first robot lawyer".

It helps users draft legal letters. You tell its chatbot what your problem is, such as appealing against a parking fine, and it will suggest what it thinks is the best legal language to use.

"People can type in their side of an argument using their own words, and software with a machine learning models matches that with a legally correct way of saying it" he says. 

The 24 year old's company is based in Silicon Valley, California, but the firms origins go back to London in 2015, where Browder was 18.

He was a horrible driver as a late teenager in Hendon, north London and got a lot of expensive parking tickets- which since he was in secondary school could not afford.

Through lots of research Mr. Browder says he found the best way to contest the tickets. "If you know the right things to say, you can save a lot of time and money".

Rather than copy and paste the same document each time, "it seemed the perfect job on software" he says. So he created the first version of DoNotPay in few weeks in 2015 just to impress his family.

Since then the app has spread across the UK and US and it now help the users write letters dealing with a range of issues-

• insurance claims
• applying for tourist visas
• complaint letter to business or local authority
• getting your money back for a holiday which you canceled or no longer go on
• cancelling gym membership

Mr. Browder says the last two uses soured during the pandemic.

DoNotPay now claims to have $150k paying subscribers. And while it has its critics, with some saying its legal advice is not accurate enough, last year it won an award from the American Bar Association for increasing legal access.

Mr. Browder claims an 80% overall success probability down to 65% for parking tickets, because "some people are guilty".

Lawyers.

So is this an issue for lawyers? Will their jobs get overtaken by AI? Actually, No. Quality work of a lawyers will not be affected by AI. AI using the methods of deep learning, will only improve the efficiency of lawyers and aid in research, contrast review, or proofreading. At most, AI robot will replace entry-level lawyers.

                                  My thoughts-

I don't think its a problem. Its not a problem to have AI to sort data and represent it. And some people here might be wanting to become a lawyer and after reading this blog, well they might be worried. As I said in the last para, AI will only help aid in the work on lawyers. Employment of lawyers is project to grow 4% till 2029, about as fast as the average for all occupations.

And also that we currently don't have AI which can reason, show creativity, and most importantly it lacks imaginative powers.  

But in the future we will see professionals using it for time saving and a sort of help. There will be improvement in AI, while some people are worried about it, some are excited and happy and welcoming it. There are several people giving several advice and opinions and but nobody known the probable future of it.