The crucial question for anyone heading into a court battle – whether a mighty corporation or a mere slip-and-fall victim – is the same, every time: “What are my chances?”
Depending on the answer, a client will decide to settle, or to stand and fight. The answer generally comes from across the oak-panelled desk of a lawyer, who draws on wisdom gained from years of practise, experience with similar cases and knowledge of the law to make a judgment call.
But as Deep Blue showed on the chess board and Watson recently demonstrated on the TV quiz show Jeopardy, it turns out robots might also be better at calculating those odds than humans. Computers, using complex algorithms to analyze tens of thousands of similar cases and decisions, can now be used to predict the outcome of court fights, according to Daniel Katz, an assistant law professor at Michigan State University.
“In some domains, it’s possible right now, and in others it’s in the not-too-distant future,” said Prof. Katz, who will be speaking in Toronto on Saturday at a conference on how new technology promises to upend the legal profession – a profession traditionally resistant to change.
He recently laid out his ideas on “quantitative legal prediction” for a group of in-house counsel from Fortune 500 companies in New York, a group he said was keen to learn about how new technology could cut the amount of money they shovel at external law firms.
Robot lawyers obviously can’t replace human intuition, or perfectly predict the outcomes of individual cases. Nor can they totally replace the experience of human lawyers. But Prof. Katz argues that a computer that can chew through reams of cases, judgments and judges’ citations – more than any human lawyer could ever digest – and spit out a percentage chance of success could be very useful to clients who are looking for a second opinion.
“The real weakness of human reasoners is aggregation or scale. You can’t do these things at that level. No person can,” he said.
While Prof. Katz’s vision may seem like science fiction, it has long been science fact. Almost a decade ago, a project conducted by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University used a computer model to predict the outcomes of a year’s worth of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They pitted their lifeless machines against a panel of distinguished law professors, including law school deans. The computer accurately predicted 75 per cent of the court’s decisions. The human experts got it right just 59 per cent of the time.
New search capabilities are revolutionizing the process known as “e-discovery,” allowing litigants to sift through mountains of e-mail and other documents to find the relevant ones.
And Lex Machina, a spinoff from a joint project of the law and computer science departments at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., has created a massive database of U.S. intellectual property litigation that uses sophisticated search and analysis techniques to help companies decide when to fight, and when to settle.
A key component of any computer analysis of legal decisions is the network of citations embedded in a database of court judgments. Judges rely on certain cases more than others, and the network of citations links different cases to each other. Crunching that data helps a computer figure out which cases are relevant, and which decisions are the most influential.
Prof. Katz compares it to the way online retailers iTunes or Amazon.com analyze your shopping or browsing data, and the data of millions of other customers, to recommend purchases to you: “Amazon has a recommender system and the judges in some sense, have provided us with a recommender system.”
The weekend event at the University of Toronto law school where Prof. Katz will speak bills itself as an “unconference,” and is meant to be a “participatory” exchange of ideas between lawyers, technology experts, academics, law students and bloggers.
Among the organizers of the event, called Law Tech Camp, is Monica Goyal, a lawyer and entrepreneur who is the co-founder of a Web-based venture meant to help people headed to Ontario small-claims court.
Her project, called My Legal Briefcase (mylegalbriefcase.com
