AI Lawyers & AI Judges? (EN)

Alpha Law Program beats human lawyers!

이전 글이었던 #2 인공지능과 법- (feat.자연어 처리?) 에서 국내에서도 '알파로 경진대회(Alpha Law Competition)' (법률인공지능을 활용한 계약서 분석기와 실제 변호사들의 계약서 분석 대회) 가 개최되었다고 소개했었는데, 직접 가서 보고, 느낀 것들을 로스쿨 내에서 기사로 썼던 것을 공유하고자 올린다.

출처: 구글이미지

Can AI Lawyers and AI Judges Replace Lawyers and Judges?

"Alpha Law" program beats human lawyers in reviewing contracts

출처: 구글이미지

On August 29, 2019, Korea's first ever competition between human lawyers and artificial intelligence took place in Seoul, with the artificial intelligence teams mostly claiming victory. However, in this competition, lawyers teamed up with an artificial intelligence legal analysis software called Alpha Law, and other lawyers teamed up with only human lawyers. They analyzed an employment contract, and they had to identify crucial facts and areas for improvement in the document within limited time. 

The result of the competition was shocking. Alpha Law teams claimed the top three spots, scoring a hundred percent on all the standardized questions. This competition showed that artificial intelligence can become a powerful tool to resolve various legal complexities and increase the quality of decision making for lawyers. 

출처: 법률방송(구글이미지)

According to an interview with CEO of Intellicon Meta Lab, Young Ik Rhim, who developed the contract analyzer program that was used in this competition, “Where there is data, there’s much room for automation. This also applies in law. Not only the cost of legal consultation is very high, but also lawyers are overwhelmed with numerous cases and documents, so we hope this AI program can help lawyers a lot. Moreover, we hope to expand this model to other forms of common contracts used in everyday like in real estate.”

If the AI program can analyze contracts more efficiently and correctly than human lawyers, can AI lawyers and AI judges replace human lawyers and human judges in the future?

Can AI Lawyers and AI Judges Replace Lawyers and Judges? Is It Really Possible?

In my opinion, replacing judges and lawyers is not possible, at least, in the next few years, but even if AI can do same jobs which lawyers and judges do in the more distant future, AI will help judges and lawyers, and it won’t replace them.

There are two reasons to support my opinion. 

First, Yoshua Bengio, who is a professor of computer science and operations research at the University of Montreal and is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of deep learning, said in an interview that we are far from human-level AI.  

Researchers are trying to understand what the issues are, such as, why is it that we can’t build machines that really understand the world as well as we do? We reached current AI level which encompasses pretty much all the methods having the biggest impact on the world right now (including what’s called deep learning). However, we have not yet reached the top of the hill, but top of the first hill. Hence, we see the limitations, for example, there are many technical challenges like perception of objects without errors and decision making capabilities keeping self-driving cars from being fully autonomous. So, we see another hill that we have to climb, and once we climb that one we will see another one, and so on. It is impossible to tell how many more breakthroughs or significant advances are going to be needed before we reach human-level AI.

As Youshua Bengio said, it is very difficult for us to guess when we can reach the human level AI because there are numerous challenges to solve. So, creating human level AI will likely to be a long way in the future. 

Second, according to the book Predicus, the author explained that “AI has an excellent ability to analyze data and find hidden patterns. In the future, the algorithm is expected to help lawyers and judges more and more by quickly analyzing the judgment patterns of complex cases and providing the vast data related to litigations.”

Similarly, as we have seen above, the opinions of AI experts indicate that replacing human lawyers and judges is a very difficult thing to achieve. However, since AI has a great capability to find hidden patterns and analyze data, it will assist human lawyers and judges. Therefore, even if is possible in the future, AI will help judges and lawyers, and it won’t replace them.