The legal field—like other professions—is undergoing a transformative phase that would integrate more advanced technology into its legal services. Technology adoption rates have accelerated in 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions for in-person meetings and legal hearings. As at a trial with inadmissible evidence, the door is now wide open to bring in technology.
This article serves as a primer on the current state of artificial intelligences (AIs) and their application to the legal field. To note, there are few resources that clearly define legal technologies—especially legal AIs—without misleading marketing terms, grandiose claims or gimmicks, or incompatible real-world applications. Most importantly, there are different classes and case scenarios of AIs existing in the real world, such as search engine AIs, content generation AIs, navigation AIs (such as self-driving cars), auto-response AIs, and much more. The knowledge in this article is based on the author’s perspective as an attorney and software engineer. (The author has personally developed numerous legal AIs from scratch in more than 45 fully voiced languages that dynamically complete legal services, as well as fully voiced homeless/COVID-19 resource map systems for California, fully voiced Constitution and Miranda rights programs, and legal guides on the Google Play Store. The author also had automated fully voiced bar exam flash card study programs, but they were decommissioned when the California Supreme Court appointed the author to the California Committee of Bar Examiners to create the July/February California bar exams for a four-year term.) The information has also been vetted through numerous dialogues with various software engineers from Google and Uber in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In the technology and programming fields, the best sources of information are local meetups because technology moves extremely fast, faster than writing and publishing articles at times. It was easier to share and disseminate new technology concepts and best practices at pre-COVID meetups.
First, this article provides an overview of the three components of an AI to better equip readers with the ability to understand and characterize the different AI programs out in the real world. Second, there is a brief discussion on how the three AI components create the different levels of AI complexities in the real world. Last, this article provides an overview of the different types of biases that could “corrupt” an AI program during its development and implementation stages and that would likely impact any development of a legal AI.