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All the laws of God and man in one:

 

 

A.I. Is Doing Legal Work. But It Won’t Replace Lawyers, Yet.

 

Impressive advances in artificial intelligence technology tailored for legal work have led some lawyers to worry that their profession may be Silicon Valley’s next victim.

 

But recent research and even the people working on the software meant to automate legal work say the adoption of A.I. in law firms will be a slow, task-by-task process. In other words, like it or not, a robot is not about to replace your lawyer. At least, not anytime soon.

 

“There is this popular view that if you can automate one piece of the work, the rest of the job is toast,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s just not true, or only rarely the case.”

 

An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, for example. Yet other lawyers’ tasks, like advising clients, writing legal briefs, negotiating and appearing in court, seem beyond the reach of computerization, for a while.

 

“Where the technology is going to be in three to five years is the really interesting question,” said Ben Allgrove, a partner at Baker McKenzie, a firm with 4,600 lawyers. “And the honest answer is we don’t know.”

 

https://www.nytimes....telligence.html

 

Why Artificial Intelligence Might Replace Your Lawyer

 

The real roll-up of all this isn’t robot lawyers, it’s financialization, with law becoming an applied branch of finance and insurance.

 

When you think about it, not a lot has changed in the legal world from the days of To Kill a Mockingbird to the latest John Grisham thriller. Sure, literature snobs may insist that Atticus Finch’s flawless moral heroism should never be compared to the conflicted protagonists of contemporary legal page-turners, but in terms of the substance of how lawyers do their lawyering, the fundamentals have barely changed in 80 years — from the career track of a young lawyer to the setup of a law firm.

 

The same cannot be said of virtually any other profession. Indeed, the legal industry seems more dusty than dynamic; the robes and wrinkles that mark those at the top of the field hardly scream modernity. But change is afoot, as a couple of powerful market forces are driving law firms to adopt modern corporate efficiency. At the heart of this movement are legal tech — including, yes, artificial intelligence — and demand. Since the financial crisis of 2007–08, there has been a “shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market for legal services,” says a report from the Legal Executive Institute, as many commercial clients with tightened budgets began bringing legal services in-house. “It’s the alignment of tech and economics that is allowing all this stuff to start moving,” says Daniel Martin Katz, professor at Illinois Tech’s Chicago Kent College of Law. 

 

http://www.ozy.com/f...ur-lawyer/75435

 

The 'robot lawyer’ giving free legal advice to refugees

 

A technology initially used to fight traffic fines is now helping refugees with legal claims.

 

When Joshua Browder developed DoNotPay he called it "the world's first robot lawyer". It's a chatbot - a computer program that carries out conversations through texts or vocal commands - and it uses Facebook Messenger to gather information about a case before spitting out advice and legal documents.

 

It was originally designed to help people wiggle out of parking or speeding tickets. But now Browder - a 20-year-old British man currently studying at Stanford University - has adapted his bot to help asylum seekers.

 

In the US and Canada, it's helping refugees complete immigration applications, and in the UK, it can aid asylum seekers in obtaining financial support from the government.

 

http://www.bbc.com/n...ending-39205935

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AI am the law

 

Computing: Software that gives legal advice could shake up the legal profession by dispensing faster and fairer justice 

 

 

GIVEN the choice, who would you rather trust to safeguard your future: a bloodsucking lawyer or a cold, calculating computer? Granted, it's not much of a choice, since neither lawyers nor computers are renowned for their compassion. But it is a choice that you may well encounter in the not-too-distant future, as software based on “artificial intelligence” (AI) starts to dispense legal advice. Instead of paying a lawyer by the hour, you will have the option of consulting intelligent legal services via the web. While this might sound outlandish, experts believe that the advent of smart software capable of giving good, solid legal advice could revolutionise the legal profession.

 

What is arguably one of the most conservative of all professions has already been quietly undergoing a technological revolution: many lawyers now use automated document-retrieval systems to store, sort and search through mountains of documents. But the introduction of smarter programs, capable of not just assisting lawyers but actually performing some of their functions, could turn the profession on its head. Such software could both improve access to justice and massively reduce legal costs, both for the client and the courts.

 

Anatomy of an artificial lawyer

 

What makes both these programs so smart is that they do more than just follow legal rules. Both tasks involve looking back through past cases and drawing inferences from them about how the courts are likely to view a new case. To do this, the programs use a combination of two common AI techniques: expert systems and machine learning.

 

Expert systems are computer-based distillations of the rules of thumb used by experts in a particular field. SplitUp, for example, uses an expert “knowledge base” of 94 different variables, which are the factors identified by legal experts as most important to judges dealing with domestic-property disputes. Because no two cases are ever the same, and because judges use different degrees of discretion, it is not enough simply to apply a set of rules to these variables, however.

 

Hence the need for machine learning, a technique in which a decision-making system is “tuned” using historical examples, and adjusting the model to ensure it produces the correct answer. The system is trained using a sample of previous cases to learn how these variables have been combined by judges in the past. All of this builds an accurate model of the decision-making process a judge might use, and allows it to be applied to new cases, says Dr Zeleznikow. GetAid also makes inferences, but instead of working out what the courts will award the client, its intelligence lies in its ability to predict whether the client has a winnable case.

 

Lawyer v computer

 

In the 1980s, a program designed to help lawyers interpret immigration law laid down by the British Nationality Act caused consternation among academics and lawyers alike. Shockingly, it could be used by lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Critics were worried that bypassing lawyers might pose a threat to democracy, because of the important role lawyers play in re-interpreting statutes laid down by Parliament, says Blay Whitby, an AI expert at the University of Sussex. “Any change to the status quo should be the subject of proper, informed democratic debate,” he says.

 

Such concerns still linger, but attitudes seem to be shifting, says Mr Forsyth, as a new generation of more technology-savvy lawyers emerges. In 1999, a Texas court banned a basic self-help software package, Quicken Family Lawyer, on the grounds that the software was, in effect, practising law without a licence. Yet within 90 days this decision was overturned. This indicates a willingness among judges, at least, to tolerate the technology. Americans may like lawsuits, but they like technology even more.

 

None of these systems threatens to put lawyers and judges out of a job, nor is that the intention. They do things that people do at the moment, says Dr Zeleznikow, “but they could be quicker and cheaper”. What the systems still lack is the ability to exercise discretion, and that is not likely to change for the foreseeable future—so humans need not worry about losing their jobs to an army of robo-lawyers. But smart software has the potential to make legal advice more readily available, unnecessary court battles less frequent, and rulings more consistent. Surely not even a lawyer could argue with that. 

 

http://www.economist.com/node/3714082