With the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, AI+ has become another outlet after “Internet plus”. Artificial intelligence service products can be seen everywhere, whether it is consumption, shopping or travel. However, the application of artificial intelligence technology is obviously more advantageous in the legal service field, which has a large number of files, complicated legal documents, and slow trial interpretation and recording speed.
Legal AI has a new opportunity to satisfy all the traditional lawyers
Every year, about 600 million people in China have legal needs, but there are less than 400,000 lawyers in the country, and the services provided by legal service institutions are far from meeting the service needs of consumers who have gradually awakened their awareness of rights protection. Legal services are in urgent need of a new injection of ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology.
In fact, In 2016, Google’s AlphaGo robot has brought legal artificial intelligence to the fire. Recently, the upgraded AlphaGo Zero also achieved a technological breakthrough and achieved true self-learning. After three days of training, it defeated its predecessor Alpha Go 100:0. There have been numerous reports of artificial intelligence robots replacing lawyers. Millions of search results have been generated on major search websites such as Baidu, Google and Qihoo 360 with “legal AI” as the key word.
Suss Kind, a British academic who studies technology and law, has argued in his book that the legal profession has changed less in the past 200 years than in the next 20. Faced with the industry pressure brought by the rapid development of AI technology, the traditional legal industry has shown inadaptability in many aspects, such as education mode, organization and charging mode. When AI technology has the ability of self-learning, people also start to have high hopes for legal AI supported by ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology.
From the perspective of work efficiency, the legal AI retrieval ability is much higher than manual retrieval, and the corresponding laws and regulations are highly accurate, which can effectively provide legal analysis services. According to media reports, E-Discovery, an ARTIFICIAL intelligence software developed by a US tech company, helped clients analyze 1.5 million files in just a few days in 2011, while a huge team of lawyers had spent months analyzing the same number of files in a previous lawsuit. Legal AI can efficiently complete years of accumulated files and make accurate judgments, and users can spend much less on legal AI than human lawyers.
From the perspective of the development trend, legal AI can quickly deal with ordinary litigation events, greatly relieving the work pressure of legal service institutions. In foreign law firms, the existing legal robots have been able to replace the work of junior lawyers. From 2009 to 2016, the number of listed legal technology companies in the world showed a blowout growth from 15 to 1164, opening the beginning of the application of ARTIFICIAL intelligence in the traditional legal service field, and legal artificial intelligence has gradually entered the public’s view.
The era of intelligent legal system has come
Since 2012, more than 280 legal technology startups have raised funding. In 2015, Den Tons, a global law firm with more than 7,000 lawyers, also started an innovative venture capital firm to invest in seven legal technology startups; ROSS, the world’s first artificial intelligence legal assistant company, has also announced the completion of A series A financing of $8.7 million. With the addition of the seed round of 4.3 million, ROSS has become one of the largest startups in the field of legal AI.
AI technology entrepreneurs saw this opportunity, and legal AI teams followed. Long before Ross’s financing, a large number of legal AI teams and AI legal workers had emerged at home and abroad.
In Europe, scientists have built artificial intelligence “judges” that can accurately predict court rulings on human rights law. AI judges can consider human ethical issues based on existing evidence, and then make decisions based on relational privacy and ethical algorithms provided by big data, with an accuracy rate as high as 79%. In May 2015, contract law robots at Law firm Bowen completed the task of processing online documents sent to them by lawyers in just two seconds — the amount of work a traditional team of lawyers would do in months.
In the United States, Legal service providers represented by Legal Zoom provide Legal advice and agency services to consumers through AI technology, meeting the Legal needs of users. The cost of services provided by legal AI is significantly lower than that of traditional law firms. Last year, Ross, an ARTIFICIAL intelligence lawyer developed by IBM, was able to do 70 percent of the work of traditional lawyers and index legal texts and similar cases with 90 percent accuracy, far higher than graduates of top law schools.
In China, the application of AI in law is almost synchronous with that in the world: Domestic law of artificial intelligence research and development team to launch the first domestic law of the robot “method of small tao” in the last year, domestic appeared after the “Wu Xiaoyong”, “dog”, and “small” part physical laws such as robot, through the voice recognition system and the ruling clerical big data integration, in the customer input speech text to extract the keywords for the analysis of cases, Select the right lawyer to provide legal services to the client.
In July, xiangshan Court in Guilin, Guangxi province, launched the voice system of “intelligent robot” and “judge assistant” to help courts hear and judge cases. At the same time, Shanghai’s High People’s Court also launched a similar “intelligent assistance system for criminal cases”. In addition, jiangsu, Chongqing and other provinces are also piloting legal AI, which can generate market judgment documents in about five minutes. And Suzhou wisdom trial also provides audio processing technology and voice recognition technology, to help the court to do a good job of real-time records, through the application of legal AI, trial time is shortened by 30% to 50%, greatly reducing the load of court staff…
With the continuous efforts of legal ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology team, legal AI helps traditional legal service institutions to complete the workload that cannot be completed by human in a short period of time, and legal AI is gradually recognized by the industry. Legal AI not only solves the problem of talent shortage in the traditional legal market, but also improves the work efficiency of legal service institutions and promotes the arrival of the era of intelligent legal system.
Ethical issues remain the biggest stumbling block to AI’s development
The application of ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology in the legal industry is increasingly popular, but from the current practical application market, legal AI will highlight more human ethical issues than AI technology in other fields.
First, for complicated cases, legal AI cannot meet the needs of emotional interaction. For robots, they currently do not understand how human emotions are generated, and it is difficult to recognize human emotions. In complex criminal cases, it is difficult for legal AI to understand the emotions of all kinds of people involved, but only to make the simplest judgment of “right and wrong”. Legal AI cannot timely help the further trial by sensing the emotions of the parties and carrying out emotional interaction. There have been cases about the defendant signature forgery, robot language logic error occurred.
Second, people’s recognition of AI legal products is not high in the market at present, and they face difficulties in promotion. The AI technology is widely used in the field of law, but it is generally accepted that, as a human emotion and logical ability of animals, but eventually will depend on the robot to judge the case as a result, it is not in human ethical morality, and the emotional communication way to cut off the people, people will eventually become like robots have no emotion “machine”.
Third, when AI technology is widely used in the legal industry, how will legal practitioners be placed? Most legal practitioners believe that with the continuous maturity of legal AI technology, the labor force of the legal profession will be reduced, and many even believe that the legal profession will be replaced by legal AI. In 2013, an Oxford University study predicted that 47% of occupations could be automated by 2034. The study looked at more than 700 occupations and came up with a long “death list” based on their chances of being automated. Among them, drivers, salespeople and most tellers in the financial industry have a 98% chance of losing their jobs to AI.
Therefore, at present, the practical application of legal AI should be for people with excellent legal literacy to improve work efficiency through AI technology, solve simple litigation events, and let legal practitioners have more disposable time to deal with complex cases. After all, legal AI still has a long way to go before it can completely replace traditional human legal services. With the continuous innovation and maturity of AI technology, legal AI is becoming civilian and close to the people. Products that serve legal needs through ARTIFICIAL intelligence are promoting the arrival of AI society ruled by law.
Liu Kuang, meditation on the Internet, wechat official account: Liukuang110