AI Is Pretty Good at Predicting Case Outcomes, It Turns Out

For the study, published in PeerJ Computer Science, researchers set a machine-learning algorithm loose on 584 cases and found that the AI could learn to predict the rulings in those cases with a relatively high percentage of accuracy. But if you're getting really excited about working with computer-lawyer-physic software in the future, well, there are a few caveats. Those 584 cases were all from the European Court of Human Rights and the analysis was based on published judgments. The program was learning to guess outcomes in a narrow class of cases, after they had already been decided. Still, the research is interesting.