Machine learning systems can help lawyers by analysing legislation and old cases, but can also subtly alter the conduct of the law

A counsel of perfection? VStock LLC/Tanya Constantine/Getty

IT HAS wormed its way into almost every sphere of life, and the law is no exception. Artificial intelligence can now handle a lot of the drudgery of legal work: sifting mountains of documents for relevant titbits, for example, or automatically drafting and checking boilerplate contracts. There’s even a “superintelligent attorney” app, ROSS, powered by IBM’s Watson supercomputer, that fields legal queries by speed-reading legislation and other resources.

But what does it mean for the law when an algorithm, rather than a person, calls the shots? Frank Levy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dana Remus at the University of North Carolina School of Law have been on the case, exploring the potential ramifications of robotic legal assistants.

In a report published online last month, they found that AI poses less of a threat to legal jobs than some fear. But they also suggest that computers, left unchecked, can have a detrimental impact on the law.


To pinpoint how many legal jobs were at risk from automation, the researchers looked at data on lawyers’ billable hours, collected by a consulting firm. Levy and Remus broke down individual tasks into work likely to be strongly, moderately, or lightly affected by AI: document review, for example, is easy to automate, but it is hard to do the same with negotiation or legal writing. They concluded that only about 13 per cent of legal work will be taken over by computers within the next five years (doi.org/bb28).

“AI predictions may slow the law’s evolution by putting lawyers off cases that could break new ground“

Still, AI will introduce new quandaries by dint of its ability to reveal legal trends or precedents, for example. Fed the right data, machine learning algorithms can tell us how individual judges ruled, how individual companies or lawyers fared in past litigation, or how much money was involved in lawsuits. Pop details of a current case in, and the computer will forecast your chances of success.

This approach might be more efficient, but it could slow the evolution of the law, the pair warn. Take the predictions too seriously, too often, and lawyers could be more reluctant to take on cases with the potential to break new ground, making it less likely that landmark judgements will be passed.

By the same token, if AI spots a pattern of discrimination – say, that women are more likely to lose in certain types of case – it might sway lawyers’ decisions and so perpetuate the problem rather than bringing it to light.

Legal AI doesn’t exist just to save lawyers time and money: it also promises to help close the “justice gap”, by offering digital advice to those who can’t afford a lawyer. Online dispute resolution platforms already help mediate between users on eBay and PayPal, for example.

But Levy and Remus suggest that AI could also soon be counselling people how best to skirt the law, rather than abide by it.

This article appeared in print under the headline “AI will see you in court”