Most lawyers today rely on AI-powered legal services to help their clients win. Services from companies like IBM, CaseText, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg provide a cutting edge advantage for any practicing attorney.

IBM’s LegalMation service can automatically scan legal documents and generate responses (with no input at all). CaseText can query millions of legal cases with the simplicity and power of doing a Google search. Services from LexisNexis and Bloomberg can accurately predict the outcome of a case based on historical data for the opposing counsel and assigned judge.

Originally, most of these innovations were designed as cost-saving measures for business-to-business related litigation. Yet, in the past couple of years, the trend has drastically shifted towards using AI-powered tools ubiquitously for all types of legal needs. The largest of these needs being in the area of employment law.

For elite law firms, representing the largest employers and institutions in the country, it is now commonplace practice for them to refute claims alleging Title VII, Title XI, ADA, GINA, and FMLA using AI-powered technology that is on the bleeding edge.

As an added benefit, there is no computational limit to the potential of these services. With advancements, these tools can render legal challenges against firms a futile effort, making them by extension, immune from accountability.

Yet, there is promise and peril to this trend.

On one hand, these tools can create a dystopian future where every legal claim is defeated. For claims pertaining to civil rights, such a trend would not only compound but it would amplify existing social inequities.

On the other end, technology has a way of being democratized. The AI-powered tools that are giving elite law firms an edge, may find themselves in the hands of utilitarian-minded individuals that seek to make these tools universally accessible. In such a future, Artificial Intelligence would make a powerful ally for the most vulnerable in society. It could guarantee access to legal services and representation that is affordable or even free.

There is no telling which outcome the future holds.

American society could be on the precipice of entering a digital era of Jim Crow or it could be headed towards a truly egalitarian society that is overseen by artificial intelligence. A society where being a minority is a condemnation that is enforced through algorithms or one where those algorithms uphold and defend basic human dignity.

Ultimately, these are questions that can only be answered by those tasked with building these tools.

Let’s hope that they choose the right of side of history.