Artificial

Intelligence and
the Law Part 1
CS158-2: Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence
4th Term AY 2019-2020
 How will AI affect the law?

How will AI change the practice of law?

How is AI used to help lawyers?

Outline
What is computational law?

Can a computer program enter into agreements and

contracts?

Should an intelligent agent be limited in what is

permitted to do?
How will AI affect the law?
The next slides will attempt to
present how Artificial Intelligence
will change the practice of law as
well as the way laws will be
formulated and administered, and
why the emergence of AI systems
will require modification and
extension of current legal concepts
and principles.
How will AI change the
practice of law?
• American Bar Association (ABA), formed in 1878
• Formed by 25 prominent lawyers in 1878, and today has 400,000
members
• Nearly 1.3M lawyers licensed and ABA established a set of rules to
ensure that the practice of law meets high ethical and professional
standards
• Today, not only do attorneys have near-instant access to virtually all
case law, a wide variety of information systems support their work in
drafting contracts, briefs, and all manner of legal documents.
• Lawyer works which can be done by AI
• Television mainly portrays lawyers representing their clients in
front of judges and juries, but legal activities are transactions, not
disputes:
• Drafting Contracts
• Filing for divorce
• Purchasing a house (requires lawyers)
• Applying for patent
• Petitioning for a change of immigrant status
• Forming a corporation
• Declaring bankruptcy
• Writing a will
• Writing an estate plan
• Registering a trademark
• Transactional works of lawyers are connected to “fill in the
blanks” form
• AI (decision-trees) which helps the customer fill them out, and
since lots of “blanks” are dependent, based on the contents of other
“blanks,” why not have the software skip the inappropriate ones?
• For example, if you don’t have children, you don’t need to fill in
information about child support on a divorce form.
• While it’s generally acceptable for software programs to provide
forms, it is not acceptable for them to do “document preparation.”
• LegalZoom, a leading company that provides document
preparation to consumers over the Internet, has been the target of
numerous lawsuits alleging that it is engaged in the unauthorized
practice of law.
• FairDocument, which wrapped their business as estate planning, but
leads itself as a lawyer referral service:
• Its sophisticated algorithms interview you about your desires and needs
• Then the company provides a draft document to an independent lawyer, who
reviews and completes the work (often with few or no changes). Then you pay
the lawyer a fee — usually far less than typical estate attorneys charge — and
FairDocument gets a cut.
• Resolving Disputes
• An AI resolving disputes before they rise to the level of a legal action or get to
trial
• If conflicts can be resolved privately, all parties are better off. To date, this
involves the use of professional negotiators, mediators, and arbitrators
essentially acting as private judges. However, new techniques are moving the
role of technology beyond simply facilitating communication between the
parties to actively participating in the resolution process.
• Modria, a purpose-built for online dispute resolution, made to resolve
up to 90 percent of claims for its customers without the need to escalate
the issue to a human customer service representative.
• Its software collects and analyzes the relevant information related to the
dispute, even incorporating such subjective considerations as the
complainant’s purchasing history and prior business relationships with
the parties involved, then uses a set of guidelines, including policies for
refunds, returns, exchanges, to propose and potentially implement a
mutually acceptable resolution.
How is AI used to help
lawyers?
e-Discovery
• Many fresh law school graduates have been horrified to find themselves assigned the
task of reading endless stacks of documents
• Due to the ease of maintaining electronic documents, the volumes produced in
response to discovery requests can be incredible
• In one antitrust case, Microsoft produced over 25 million pages of documents, all of
which had to be reviewed. How could this possibly be completed in a practical time
frame at a reasonable cost?
• A technique called “predictive coding” can permit a computer to perform this mind-
numbing task with speed, diligence, and accuracy far exceeding that of human
reviewers.
• The criteria may involve everything from simple phrase matching to very
sophisticated semantic analysis of the text, context, and participants. The newly
trained program is then run on a subset of the remaining items to produce a new set of
documents, and these in turn are reviewed by the attorneys.
What is computational law?
• Computational law is the study of structure of legal information,
focusing on the automation of formerly manual processes and the
integration. Computational law systems automate processes such
as compliance checking, legal planning and regulatory analysis.
• Approaches of computational law:
• Algorithmic law attempts to create a legal language code that is machine-
readable and machine-executable
• Empirical analysis looks to citations, often used in law, to analyze and create
citation indices and large graphs of legal patterns referred to as citation
networks.
• Computational law is not used only in legal applications and court
rooms.
• TurboTax, a tax preparation software for the United States and
Canadian, uses computational law to make calculations based on tax
laws to process tax returns
• The non-profit organization Creative Commons uses computational law
to provide custom-generated copyright licenses
• Legal analytics uses big data and user-friendly tools to provide business
intelligence and performance measuring solutions
Can a computer program enter
into agreements and contracts?
• When you purchase something online, no human makes the decision to
contract with you, yet the commitment is mandatory.
• The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA), validates contracts
formed by electronic agents authorized by their principals. Similarly,
approve credit card purchases, issue credits, and so on.
 Should an intelligent agent be
limited in what it is permitted to do?
• For the purpose of equal distribution:
• The town where I live offers two- hour free parking in many places, after which you
are required to move your car. Why? To ensure that this free resource is distributed
equitably and is used for temporary periods, such as while you are shopping or
eating out, as opposed to all-day parking for employees who work nearby.
• So is it fair to permit a self-driving car to repark itself every two hours? This would
seem to violate the intent of the law.
• A less visible though more annoying example is the use of so-called bots to purchase
scarce resources online, such as concert tickets, and a practical reason to limit the
agent in what it is permitted to do.
• Will Smith submitted his vote via AI (that he created) as he was on holiday.
Later on, he published this on his blog and some readers filed a case against
him as US law requires a voter to personally vote, whether in person, by
mail, or electronically. The use of intelligent agents to act on your behalf
may be reasonably restricted in the future
Questions?