An online robot lawyer designed to help people represent themselves in court state their case to the sentencing magistrate will be launched by a Melbourne law firm this week.

Key points: Robot lawyer provides service for people unable to access legal aid

Robot lawyer provides service for people unable to access legal aid Produces a template for people to read out as their statement when they go to court

Produces a template for people to read out as their statement when they go to court Only works if the person's answers to program's questions are 'relatively predictable'

Bill Doogue, a partner at Doogue O'Brien George, said he had seen too many people — up to 30 per cent — going through the court system unrepresented.

"You see people constantly come out of court and they're quite distressed, because they haven't told their story, they just haven't been able to," he said.

Mr Doogue said while the template produced by the robot lawyer was only a starting point and not the whole process, it would help those people who turn up to court unprepared.

"[Some people] are visibly distressed and uncomfortable talking and give monosyllabic answers to the magistrate, when they have a story they should be telling," he said.

The technology works by a person logging into the system and providing personal information, along with details about the offence they have been charged with.

"The robot has a number of hurdles that it places in front of people, but they have to be pleading guilty, it has to be a minor offence, and they can't have priors," Mr Doogue said.

"Then they just use the online service to prepare their data to hand up to the magistrate."

It will be the first time this technology would be used for criminal cases in Australia.

Robot lawyer 'can not replace services provided by a real lawyer'

Mr Doogue said in no way was robot created to "pinch lawyers' work".

"This gives [unrepresented people] the ability to do [their statement] in a reflective way, write down what's going on in their life," he said.

"And they're answering the questions any criminal lawyer is going to ask them."

Lyria Bennett Moses, an associate professor of law at the University of New South Wales, said the program was extremely useful and a skill that all lawyers should in fact have.

"People entering the legal profession should not only know and understand the law, they should be proficiently skilled to be able to understand these kinds of systems and ideally build them," she said.

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But she said the program did run on the assumption that the person using it was in the "99 per cent" and was inevitably not as good as having a real human lawyer.

She said it only worked if the person had "relatively standard predictable answers" to the questions asked by the program.

"If you fall outside of that or if you don't understand the question being asked, what you can end up with is not the same thing as you can get with a human," she said.

"They're not an advocate in court arguing your case, they are basically helping you be a better litigant in person."

Associate Professor Bennett Moses also warned that robot lawyer did not eliminate the need for more government funding for legal aid services.

"All tools have limitations, they don't cover everyone's case and they don't meet the same need that services like legal aid services are currently meeting," she said.