Artificial intelligence transforming legal landscape – CCJ Judge

…says it increases access to legal services for those who cannot afford to pay

Advances in technology are changing the legal landscape, and while it is being utilised to enhance the work of practitioners at the Bar and the Bench, those who do not adopt and embrace these rapid changes will be left behind.
This view was expressed by Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) Judge Winston Anderson at the Guyana Bar Association’s Law Week Symposium titled “New Frontiers in Law, Preparing for the Future”, which was held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC) on Friday.
Addressing a large gathering consisting Attorney General Anil Nandlall, SC, Hierarchy and other stakeholders of the Judiciary, diplomats, attorneys-at-law, and law students, Justice Anderson said that technological advances continue to intensify in all aspects of our lives and are the single most important driver of economic development and social advancement. Like technology, he said, the law is omnipresent in our lives.
During his presentation, he highlighted that the legal profession has in recent times undergone seismic technological-induced changes of which the key driver is Government regulations, and touched on various types of technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“AI, the automating of decision-making processes using algorithms that learn from data and gets smarter over time, has its most obvious application in the field of legal research and the metronomic review of contracts. In preparation for litigation, it is common practice to go through many, sometimes hundreds of past cases, to find the specific cases that are helpful to legal submissions. This can be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
“Lawyers spend up to one-third of their time doing this research. However, technologies powered by AI can now go through the databases and intelligently flag the most relevant cases. Work that would take hours now takes minutes, thus reducing the cost of legal services and making these services more accessible,” the CCJ Judge said near the end of his feature address.
According to him, current technologies now allow the programming of basic legal prepositions into decision trees and deliver legal answers to the public through tools that people use every day such as Facebook, Messenger, and WeChat.
“These messaging apps allow a person to speak to a computer programme as if they are speaking to a human lawyer. A person may now take out his/her smartphone and ask his/her robot lawyer for advice on divorce, custody, hire purchase, contracts, rental, conveyancing, you name it.”

Transforming the
legal landscape
In making his point, he alluded to anecdotal stories of persons in the USA contesting traffic tickets on the basis of legal advice received from chatbots. And in one case, he pointed out, a dissatisfied plaintiff is suing his robot lawyer, DoNotPay “for practicing without a licence”.
Predictive AI, he added, has powerful potential for increasing access to legal services for persons who are traditionally excluded for reasons of costs.
To this end, he shared, “Advances in voice recognition technology and voice as user interface allow the offering of legal services to thousands of people in the Caribbean and to the 750,000,000 worldwide who are illiterate…many of whom are women.”
Automation of contract review, legal research, and predictive analytics are just some examples of how “AI is being used to transform the legal landscape,” Justice Anderson noted.
He went on to say, “Even more profound is AI’s intrusion into the process of judicial adjudication. It is now becoming commonplace for Judges to apply AIs to help in determining the mean or average sentence. Using AI here is somewhat understandable since some of the sentencing guidelines I have seen are so complex that only calculators can properly do the calculations.” But Judges are using AI to determine other legal questions.
In January of this year, the CCJ Judge said that a Judge in Colombia caused a stir by admitting in his judgement that he used the AI tool ChatGPT when deciding an autistic child’s rights to insurance benefits.
While the Judge defended his use of AI, suggesting that it could make Colombia’s bloated legal system more efficient, Justice Anderson said that the Judge’s detractors expressed the fear that robots could replace Judges.

Lab for experimenting
According to the regional Judge, the laboratory for experimenting with the replacement of Judges by machines is China which boasts the most aggressive use of AI in judicial decision-making.
“China has been building a smart court system since 2016. The new system requires the Judges to consult AI on each case and if they reject the AI recommendation, they must provide a written explanation. The system automatically screens for cases for references, recommends laws and regulations, drafts legal documents, and alters perceived human errors, if any in a verdict.”
“China’s Supreme People’s Court in Bejing reports that AI had cut a Judges average workload by over a third and saved Chinese citizens over 1.7B working hours from 2019 to 2021 and its legal system US$45B. AI systems were working through the entire process, from investigations to prosecution to adjudication,” Justice Anderson pointed out.
In one instance, he shared that an AI programme assisted with the trial of 10 people who had failed to repay bank loads. “Previously, it would have taken 10 separate trials to resolve the issue but the AI resolved all the cases in one hearing with one Judge, and a decision was made available in 30 minutes.” When it comes to the use of technology in legal practice, the CCJ Judge observed that law firms are breaking away from the traditional approach by offering online portals and online updates which have a “decisive competitive edge”.