The Public Domain is full of initiatives by many Law Universities, large law firms, and various government departments on the topic of “AI and Law “. I was happy to see a news article a few days ago about the Indian Consumer grievances cell thinking about using AI to clear a large number of pending cases. They have had some success in streamlining processes and making it all digital but they felt that the sheer large volume of pending cases needs AI-type intervention. I have already talked about the huge volume of civil cases pending in lower courts in India and some cases taking even 20 years to get final judgment. As the saying goes “Justice delayed is Justice denied”, it is imperative that we find solutions to this huge backlog problem.
All discussions are centred around two broad areas: –
1. Legal Research and development of customer’s case by Law firms. Basically, core work of both junior and senior law associates and partners.
2. Assisting judges or even rendering judgment on their own by AI models to reduce backlog and speedy justice.
Lots of interesting discussions happening on (1). Law research, looking into archives, similar judgments, precedence’s, etc. seem to be a no-brainer. Huge advances in automation have been already done and this will increase multi-fold by these Law purpose-built language models. What will happen to junior law associates is an interesting question. Can they use better research and develop actual arguments and superior case brief for their clients and take the load off senior associates who in turn can focus more on customer interactions? I found discussions on the model analysing judges’ earlier judgments and making the argument briefs customized per judge, fascinating.
The no (2) item needs lot of discussions. All democratic countries jurisprudence is based on these 3 fundamental principles.
- Every citizen will have their “day in the court” to present their case to an impartial judge.
- Every citizen will have a right to a competent counsel with a provision of public defenders given free to the citizens.
- Every witness can be cross examined by the other party without any restrictions.
On the one hand, we have these great jurisprudence principles. On the other hand, we have huge backlogs and delays.
How much citizens are willing to give up some of the basic principles to get speedy justice?
Can we give up the principle of “my day in Court” and let only written briefs submitted to the court to be used for final judgement? This will mean witness statements in briefs will not be cross examined or questioned.
Can we give up the presence of a human judge who will read the briefs on both sides and make a judgement and let an AI Model read both the briefs and pronounce the judgement?
Even if citizens are willing to give up these principles, does the existing law of the land allow this? It may require changes to law and in some countries even changes to their constitution to allow for this new AI jurisprudence.
Do we differentiate between civil cases and criminal cases separately and find different solutions? Criminal cases will involve human liberty issues such as imprisonment and will need a whole set of different benchmarks.
What about changes to appeal process if you do not like lower court judgment? I presume we will need human judges to review the judgements given by AI Models. It is very difficult for us to accept higher court AI model, reviewing and correcting a lower court AI model’s original judgement.
The biggest hurdle is going to be us, the citizens. In any legal case involving two parties, one party always and in many cases both parties will be unhappy with any judgement. No losing party in any civil case is going to be happy that they lost as per some sub clause in some law text. In many cases, even winning parties may not be happy with the award amount. In this kind of scenario, how do you expect citizens to accept an instantaneous verdict after both parties submit their briefs? This will be a great human change management issue.
Even if we come out with some solutions to these complex legal and people problems, one technical challenge still remains a big hurdle. With the release of many large language models and APIs, many projects are happening to train these LLMs on specific domain. A few days ago, we saw a press release by EY about their domain-specific model developed with an investment of US$1.4 Billion. Bloomberg announced a BloombergGPT, their own 50-billion parameters language model purpose-built for finance. Who will bell the cat for the Law domain? Who will invest large sums of $$s and create a Legal AI Model for each country? Until this model is available for general use, many of the things we discussed will not be possible.
To conclude, there are huge opportunities to get business value out of the new AI technology in the Law and Justice Domain. However, technical, legal and people issues must be understood, addressed and resolved before any large-scale implementation.
More Later. Like to hear your thoughts.
L Ravichandran