Will AI replace judges and lawyers?

An artificial intelligence method developed by University College London computer scientists and associates has predicted the judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with 79% accuracy, according to a paper published Monday, Oct. 24 in PeerJ Computer Science. The method is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court by automatically analyzing case text using a machine-learning algorithm.* "We don't see AI replacing judges or lawyers," said Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science, "but we think they'd find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes. It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European Convention on Human Rights." In developing the method, the team found that judgments by the ECtHR are highly correlated to non-legal (real-world) facts, rather than direct legal arguments, suggesting that judges of the Court are, in the jargon of legal theory, "realists" rather than "formalists."