Automation in the Legal World: a possible future?

Recent technological advances and the rapid development and diffusion of artificial intelligence techniques and data science approaches helped to achieve research improvements and results in many different fields, from medical science to archaeology and biology. Is a similar integration of technology in law possible? The current adoption of legal informatics is promising, ranging from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automated decision making or blockchain’s smart contracts. AI techniques are currently used for automated legal knowledge extraction and enrichment to reduce the manual involvement of legal experts as much as possible, and to improve the accuracy of document classification, by progressively enriching the term sets associated with ontology concepts. The application of expert systems technology in the legal profession is increasing thanks to the availability of tools that can adequately represent complex reasoning strategies. In general, legal expert systems represent regulations as sentences in formal logic and mechanical reasoning techniques are applied to the facts at hand to derive consequences from the application of logic to the facts. The advantages are speedier delivery of legal advice and reduced time spent in repetitive, labour intensive legal tasks. Automated decision making has been used for several years in the United States by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to render administrative decisions concerning areas of taxation, which were previously handled by the human personnel. Smart contracts, self-executable computer programs able to carry out the terms of a contract or a business agreement between two or more parties are used to issue prescriptions, general stock management, mortgages, land title recording and supply chain. Digital forensic science focuses on the recovery and investigation of material found in digital devices related to cybercrime in order to present evidence in a court of law when required. However, for a widespread usage of computer science into legal science, different issues must be taken into account. The first question for any technology based on AI is whether it works as intended. Will AI systems work as they promise, or will they fail? If and when they fail, what will be the results of those failures? Some machine learning techniques such as deep learning in neural networks make it difficult or impossible to really understand why the machine is making the choices that it makes. The lack of transparency brings to ethical and privacy implications: indeed, AI is dependent upon the diversity and inherent bias of the experts training it to mimic their decision-making.