31 January 2024
A ‘robot lawyer’ has been made available on the market in America. This is an app with legal information that would make using a lawyer unnecessary. ‘Fight corporations’, ‘find hidden money’, ‘beat bureaucracy’. This is what the robot can and will do. ‘Sue everybody,’ is the urgent advice.
The Dutch legal profession will probably laugh about it. In 2015, the profession was rocked by the introduction of supercomputer ‘Watson’, an IBM system that connects artificial intelligence with legal data and natural language processing. However, after the first alarming reports about the fragile competitiveness of lawyers, not much more was heard of Watson.
Yet the ever-advancing ‘artificial intelligence’ will have an impact on the legal world, and it is misplaced to underestimate it. A recent study by a renowned medical journal found that patients found the answers provided by the robot ChatGPT to be better than those provided by doctors in 79 per cent of cases. The harsh verdict was that the chat box was also more empathetic. Artificial intelligence will also be indispensable in future warfare, warns professor emeritus Ko Colijn. The ‘killer robot’, for example – a drone that autonomously seeks out and destroys targets – will make its appearance. The algorithms determine who is attacked without human control. Artificial intelligence has also made its appearance in music. A robot created a song by rapper Drake and singer The Weekend without the artists themselves being involved.
Artificial intelligence will not bypass the legal profession either. Enter a case and ChatGPT and related chatbots will come up with excellent legal advice, phrased in proper jargon. Courts will sometimes have to rule in cases based on fake news and manipulated audio and visual material. They will be confronted with court documents written partially by a robot. Go figure.
Does the robot lawyer mean the end of the legal profession? It is unlikely. Every case is different. Circumstances will always vary. In other words, lawyers will always be needed to highlight these differences and draw the consequences desired by their clients from them. It is certain that the legal world is facing major changes and the players in that market will have to move with it to survive.
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This column ‘Robot lawyer’ was written for Den Haag Centraal. Raymond de Mooij writes a monthly column about what he experiences in his practice.
