The View from Law:

Increasingly AI-enabled legal technologies are used to carry out ‘law jobs’ – tasks that form part of the activity and craft of lawyers. AI is ‘hard at work in the law’ in legal research, compliance, contract analysis, document generation, prediction of judgment. [1]  Sceptics and proponents alike describe these technologies as transformative, disruptive, productive of change.[2] Hildebrandt, crucially, envisages that such technologies will alter not only the practices of lawyers but the institutions of law and law itself. She anticipates that law-as-we-know it – a mode of existence of law which relies on the affordances of text – will be transformed by the wide-scale adoption of legal technologies with potential consequences for the rule of law and legal protection.[3] 

The legal technology sector is booming; law firms, courts and governments are looking to harness the opportunities afforded by AI. Hildebrandt’s warning is apposite; it is important to understand the implications of the adoption of such technologies. It is less clear which methods and approaches are best suited to providing a grounded assessment of those implications.

Contemporary philosophers of technology provide insights and strategies for anticipating the future impact of technologies on citizens, society, and the way in which we perceive and navigate the world.[4] However, it is unclear whether these strategies fully account for the context of use of the technologies or allow us to measure or quantify the potential risk of adverse effects. An inter-disciplinary collaboration might provide a platform for exploring and testing a range of approaches for assessing the impact of AI in the law.

The View from Computer Science (CS):
The view described above is a view of the problem related to the Law domain. At Durham 
University, specifically in the EPSRC Twenty20Insight project, the focus is on the other 
side of the coin. 

As innovative digital technology (specially AI/ML) permeates every area of modern life, they 
are tackling incompletely understood problems by developing systems whose behaviour and 
broader impact are, by necessity, also incompletely understood. This poses problems in the 
problem domain. 

In the Problem domain, there is a need to give stakeholders a means to understand how
technologies based on ML/AI/Vision can be applied to their problems exploring the 
Horizon of Possibilities - HoP, defining the Envelope of Acceptability – EoA for AI-based Software Responsibility.

This project will tackle both interlinked views explained above. 

Aim:

To create an interdisciplinary collaboration to provide a platform for exploring and testing a 
range of approaches for assessing the impact of AI in the law and AI-based Software.

The approach is to enable conversations about:

• delivering human-centred techniques and tools to help stakeholders explore the HoP and 
  define the EoA for AI-based Software Responsibility focusing on legal aspects.
  To do the the following objectives have been set:

1. 1. To convene two different IAS Seminars/ Conversations.
      Seminar 1: Dr Pauline McBride will lead one of those Seminars.
      Dr McBride holds an LLB (Hons) in Jurisprudence, the Diploma in Legal Practice and a PhD in Law from the University of Glasgow and is a leader in the area.
   2. Seminar 2: Dr Bencomo (Durham) and Dr McBride will chair a longer workshop to discuss 
      further insights

• To form a consortium for an ambitious interdisciplinary project during 2023/24;
• To design an inter-department teaching module on the topic AI-enabled legal 
  technologies

EVENTS

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED: Friday 26th January 2024 12pm - 3pm. 

MELT: A method for evaluating legal technologies - Seminar 1

Thursday 28th March 2024 11am - 2pm

Details of this event TBC.

Footnotes

[1] Mills, Artificial Intelligence in Law: the State of Play 2016 < https://britishlegalitforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Keynote-Mills-AI-in-Law-State-of-Play-2016.pdf> (accessed 6 June 2023). See also Donahue, Lauri. "A primer on using artificial intelligence in the legal profession." JOLT Digest (2018); Davis, Anthony E. ‘The Future of Law Firms (and Lawyers) in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ (2020) Revista Direito Gv 16  3.

[2] See for example, John O. McGinnis and Russell G. Pearce, ‘The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services’ (2014) 82 Fordham L. Rev. 3041; Sobowale, Julie. "How artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession." (2016) ABA J 1: 1; Chishti, Susanne (ed.), The LegalTech Book: The Legal Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and Fintech Visionaries (John Wiley and Sons Ltd 2020); Mireille Hildebrandt, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology (Paperback edition, Edward Elgar Publishing 2016).; John Arsneault, ‘The Disruption Of Legal Services Is Here’ <https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/09/20/the-disruption-of-legal-services-is-here/> (accessed 6 June 2023).

[3] M. Hildebrandt, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology (Edward Elgar Publishing 2015) Chapters 7 and 8. See also Hildebrandt, ‘Modes of Existence ‘in Working paper I on Text-driven Normativity <https://publications.cohubicol.com/working-papers/text-driven-normativity/> (accessed 6 June 2023).

[4] The work of Bruno Latour, Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh, among others, is relevant.