Predicting Justice: What if Artificial Intelligence Entered the

Courthouse?

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Summary: A new article looks at how

artificial intelligence can help in dispute
resolution cases and considers the future of AI in the legal system.
Source: The Conversation.
A: “I just learned that the entrance to my home, which is rented out, was damaged by the
tenants. I want to be reimbursed for the repairs, but can I afford the risk and expense of civil
litigation?B: “Why not rely on an algorithm?”
A: “Algorithm? I would never put my legal rights in the hands of an algorithm!”
B: “Algorithm have neither hands nor hearts, nor preferences or attitudes. They simply perform
calculations and provide objective, neutral and reliable responses to your questions – what are the
best legal solutions are, and probability that you’ll recover the costs for the repairs. Algorithms can
answers such questions.”
A: “Does this means I could go ahead even without a lawyer? It would be reassuring to know I’d
receive neutral, objective information. Just one question: who makes the algorithms?”
B: “Well, it’s complicated – I really don’t know…”
A: “So how do we know if the algorithm is correctly designed?”
B: “It’d be based on artificial intelligence…”
A: “But how can we qualify something as intelligent if we do not understand how does it works?”
Is this a conversation out of a work of science fiction? Not at all. Big-data analytics and algorithmic
applications are already making their appearance in traditional court settings in many countries,
following on the integration and scaling up of information technology (IT) systems already present.
One of the leading IT applications is in file management, where it can reduce costs and case speed
processing. And yet today, technology seems to be conducive of a much more disruptive and
revolutionary type of change.
In France, the possibility of using algorithmic dispute-resolution mechanisms for relatively minor
court matters has been included in the justice-reform agenda put forward by the Minister of Justice,
Nicole Belloubet. Approximately 2.7 million cases could be affected.
However, the extension of the online-mediation procedure to the cases that have been traditionally
handled and adjudicated by first-instance judges – notably small claims and misdemeanours –
requires the attention of scholars and practitioners as well as citizens and other stakeholders.
As jurist Antoine Garapon rightly describes it, we are facing a revolution that raises serious
questions. This revolution consists into a new method to deal with both the norm-building process
and reality construction, as it has been described by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The
digital transformation of how justice is rendered to claimants and litigants touches upon our way of
writing the reality, facts and legal arguments traditionally delegated to judges. And what is the
minimum level of knowledge and awareness that institutions should ensure that rights-holders have
so that they can decide to make a claim or not, or to file a case or not?
From processing to prediction
Several years ago the Los Angeles Police Department adopted a predictive-policing system called
PredPol. While superficially similar to the traditional practice of hot-spot mapping, it uses massive
data sets of individual behaviours and neighborhoods, and promises to better direct police efforts to
reduce crime. A similar platform, called the Crime Anticipation System (CAS), is being developed
in Amsterdam.
Such approaches raise many questions, however. Police work might reduce criminal activities in
one place, only to have them occur elsewhere. Or potential criminals could wait until officers leave
before taking action. A related approach is risk terrain mapping, where the crime history of a
particular region is merged with local behaviours to define crime-prone areas.
Another application that goes beyond simple case management is online dispute resolution, which
has been adopted in the United Kingdom as well as in the Netherlands. Many legal scholars and
practitioners argue that such mechanisms have a significant and largely underexplored potential.
While IT-driven changes may be challenging, Judge Dory Reiling of the Amsterdam District Court
has argued that they have potential for supporting legal and judicial decision-making processes as
well as litigation settlements. In a 2017 article on online dispute resolution, she cites several
examples:
“Civil Resolution Tribunal is a digital tribunal set up to decide disputes about strata, subsidised
housing in British Columbia, Canada. It provides assistance with exploring solutions to a problem,
with producing documents, and if necessary, access to a tribunal hearing.”
“Rechtwijzer uit elkaar [legal guidance on separation] helps couples wanting to separate or divorce
make a plan for the separation, and with the separation itself. At the end of June 2016, according to
information on the site, more than 1,000 couples had started making a separation plan. The tool
includes online forms, chat functionality, calculation tools, and the ability to get help from an
expert.”
Massive data to detect behaviours
The arrival of such technology can have other impacts as well. For example, once documents
associated with civil-litigation procedures are consistently scanned and made available in digital
format, large-scale analysis may well be possible as a case of data analytics.
The knowledge that can be drawn from massive data sets of civil or commercial litigations – and
perhaps criminal cases eventually – could also provide information about correlations between
situations, behaviours and judicial decisions. For example, patterns of behaviour by litigants,
lawyers and judges can be detected and made available to the broader public. Algorithms could also
tell us the probability that a legal decision or a judicial adjudication of a case can be set at a
particular point, be it costs, fees, sentences, monetary sanctions, and so forth.
But is this everything we need to know, and the story that we want to tell the generations that come
after us?
A case of efficiency and cost-reduction strategy
After a long series of reforms oriented toward judicial independence, international bodies such as
the United Nations, the European Council and the OECD have promoted an approach that focuses
on efficiency rather than exclusively on impartiality.
In this respect, IT-based systems are praised for their perceived potential to reduce costs. Moreover,
the possibility to access the justice institutions through online tools – the public portal through
which individuals may file a case or follow up the case in which they are litigants or convicted –
may be an asset for justice systems that are too dispersed and where citizens may have difficulty
traveling to central courthouses.
Figures from the European Council provide an interesting overview as to how and to what extent IT
has been infused into court systems.
The French example
Information technology can also increase information-access equality. This is what is provided
through France’s SAUJ system – Service d’accueil unique du justiciable (“single service for
litigants”).
SAUJ is a virtual front desk set up at the level of the first-instance courts where citizens can receive
free information, get directions, and access cases in which they’re involved, be it as litigants,
victims, witnesses or defendants. Its appeal is that it simplifies access to the justice system.
Introduced in France on an experimental basis in 2014 and followed up in a sample of pilot courts
from 2014 and 2016 – Bobigny, Brest, Dunkerque, Privas and Vesoul in France, and Saint-Denis on
La Réunion – it has since been extended to the national court system. The use of SAUJ is intended
to increase public accountability of the courts, including their management of resources,
productivity and organisation.

Use of IT in courts could help make justice more efficient. But would it be fair?
NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from The Conversation article.
Yet SAUJ does not tell the entire story on IT’s disruptive impact on the legal system – in both the
positive and negative sense.
Transformative changes for judges
Pushed further, information technology could provide completely dematerialised tools to facilitate
judges’ decisions or better orient the choices of citizens and legal representatives. For example, a
judge who must rule on a complex and ground-breaking case may want to be aware of relevant case
laws. Data analytics can provide insights, analysing already-adjudicated cases and surfacing those
that are similar.
Trends in appeal and revision rates may also be easily detected, and the patterns of past rulings in
similar situations could be revealed. Using such algorithms, litigants seeking damages could learn
the success of similar cases, and if necessary adjust their strategies or perhaps even decide to not
move forward.
Is technology a guarantee of quality – and equality?
While more technology potentially means more insight, will it provide us with not only higher-
quality decision, but also more egalitarian ones?
Several questions need to be answered. How would such IT tools be designed, built and monitored?
What is the rationale inspiring the creation of such algorithms? And to what extent can citizens be
more aware of this rationale than they are of the centuries of tradition that has current methods of
adjudication?
What makes the entire difference between the legal code and an algorithm in terms of quality of
justice is the possibility for citizens to understand and be responsible in the universe in which they
find themselves. Rights-holders are sometimes litigants, sometimes victims, sometimes
entrepreneurs, but always citizens.
That is why a digital revolution in the legal world should be observed from the point of view of the
citizens, those separate from the algorithms themselves. For years the issue of the opacity and the
intelligibility of the judicial machinery has gained the priority in the list of dimensions that a system
of quality of justice should consider. In the same vein, if we want to ensure that laws and legal cases
are intelligible to citizens and non-legal experts, should we also call for more transparency and
responsiveness in the algorithm-making process (in the creation of IT-driven norms)?
A different but equally compelling question is better understanding the point of view of judges and
attorneys on the rationale and use of IT tools upon which their daily activities would be based. This
will help ensure that we are still ruled by the law rather than falling into the trap of making the rule
of law equal to the rule of code.
A B O U T T H I S N E U RO S C I E N C E R E S E A R C H A RT I C L E

Funding: Réseau français des instituts d’études avancées (RFIEA) provides funding as a member
of The Conversation FR.
Source: Daniela Piana – The Conversation
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from The Conversation article.
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The Conversation “Predicting Justice: What if Artificial Intelligence Entered the Courthouse?.”
NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 24 April 2018.
<http://neurosciencenews.com/ai-justice-8874/>.