Legal intake, the process of finding out if an applicant is eligible for help from a free legal aid program, takes significant time and resources. In part this is because eligibility criteria are nuanced, open-textured, and require frequent revision as grants start and end. In this paper, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs) to reduce this burden. We describe a digital intake platform that combines logical rules with LLMs to offer eligibility recommendations, and we evaluate the ability of 8 different LLMs to perform this task. We find promising results for this approach to help close the access to justice gap, with the best model reaching an F1 score of .82, while minimizing false negatives.

Discussions over whether "robots" will replace people have increased since the introduction of sophisticated AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard, and studies indicate that some jobs--surprisingly, some traditionally white-collar work--may be significantly impacted. Since the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, generative AI--a type of artificial intelligence that can produce text or other content in response to user prompts--has quickly grown in popularity. Since its November 2022 release, users have used the AI chatbot ChatGPT for a variety of tasks, including as creating programming and producing college-level essays. Once Google introduced Bard on March 21, a rival to ChatGPT and a separate entity from the company's Google search engine, the AI competition picked up steam. Over 300 million jobs, or 18% of employment worldwide, could be automated, according to a new Goldman Sachs analysis, with more developed countries being severely impacted than emerging markets.

Attorney Bryan Rotella said the growing use of AI in legal services will increase efficiency but could threaten the jobs of legal assistants and young lawyers. The rise of artificial intelligence could create a ripple effect across the legal industry, putting law school students out of entry-level jobs before even entering the workforce and stripping them of necessary experience to become good lawyers, an attorney of over 20 years said. "What concerns me is that you're going to have a whole bunch of people coming out of law school with huge loans, which we already know is a crisis, and they're going to be outsourced by this artificial intelligence," Bryan Rotella, attorney and founder of GenCo Legal, told Fox News. "I don't know that anyone's warning them of that." As AI is increasingly incorporated into industries like health care, financial services and the legal field, Rotella said there are many ways this technology can be used to aid professionals.

Emerging technologies could have profound effects on legal processes, but are the ready for the courtroom?

A'robot' that was set to make history for advising the first defendant in court with artificial intelligence (AI) has now been accused of operating without a law degree. The AI-powered app DoNotPay faces allegations that it is'masquerading as a licensed practitioner' in a class action case filed by US law firm Edelson. The chatbot-style tool is centred around making legal information and'self-help' accessible to support consumers fighting against large corporations. But Chicago-based law firm Edelson has claimed the service is'unlawful' and the company itself has'substandard' legal documents. In a file published by the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco, the complainant said: 'Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm.

Next month, AI will enter the courtroom, and the US legal system may never be the same. An artificial intelligence chatbot, technology programmed to respond to questions and hold a conversation, is expected to advise two individuals fighting speeding tickets in courtrooms in undisclosed cities. The two will wear a wireless headphone, which will relay what the judge says to the chatbot being run by DoNotPay, a company that typically helps people fight traffic tickets through the mail. The headphone will then play the chatbot's suggested responses to the judge's questions, which the individuals can then choose to repeat in court. But it also has the potential to change how people interact with the law, and to bring many more changes over time.

AI and the law is a vital upcoming profitable opportunity for lawyers, law firms, and law students. The gauntlet had been thrown. You see, I was the invited keynote speaker at a major legal industry conference and my heralded topic was squarely in my wheelhouse, namely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the law (typically coined as AI & Law). Rather than being entirely heralded, maybe the more apt phrasing is to say that the topic was met with a mixture of excitement by some and outright eyebrow-raising skepticism by others. The assembled collection of several hundred law firm partners and associates murmured and questioned subtly whether anything about AI and the law especially needed to be known by them. AI was generally perceived as a pie-in-the-sky topic. On top of that contention, AI when combined with the law was equally or even further at the outreaches of what daily hard-working nose-to-the-grind lawyers would seem to be thinking about. I'm pleased to say that my remarks were well-taken and the response was quite positive, including that this was the first time many of them had ever heard a no-nonsense compelling and comprehensive case made for why lawyers ought to know about AI and the law. The discussion got those top-notch legal-minded gears going and the attendees had plenty to ruminate on. Let's see if the same can be said for those of you that might be interested or at least intrigued by the AI & Law topic. First, a vital facet to know is that AI & Law consists of two intertwined conceptions. I want to emphatically make clear-cut that these are both bona fide and rapidly expanding ways in which AI and the law are being combined. Many attorneys are only familiar with one or the other of the two perspectives, or oftentimes not familiar with either of the two. Depending upon your lawyering preferences, it is perfectly fine to concentrate on one of the two and not particularly focus on the other. By and large, lawyers that seem less inclined toward having an interest in technology are bound to keep their eye on the law as applied to AI, wherein you don't necessarily need to get your hands into the tech per se. Those lawyers that seem to relish the high-tech infusion into the legal realm are more apt to gravitate toward the realm of AI as applied to the law. You are welcome to embrace both aspects and do so with your head held high. I'll first herein do some meaty unpacking on the law as applied to AI. When referring to the law as applied to AI, you should immediately be thinking about the emerging litany of new laws seeking to govern the advent of AI systems. Laws are springing up like wildfire. International laws are coming forth about AI & Law, federal laws too, state laws also, and local laws aplenty, see my ongoing coverage at the link here and the link here, just to name a few.

Electronic brain implants could allow lawyers to quickly scan years of background material and cut costs in the future, a new report claims. The report from The Law Society sets out the way the profession could change for employees and clients as a result of advances in neurotechnology. It suggests that a lawyer with the chip implanted in his or her brain could potentially scan documentation in a fraction of the time, reducing the need for large teams of legal researchers. 'Some lawyers might try to gain an advantage over competitors and try to stay ahead of increasingly capable AI systems by using neurotechnology to improve their workplace performance,' wrote Dr Allan McCay, the author of the report. Neurotechnology could also allow firms to charge clients for legal services based on'billable units of attention' rather than billable hours, as they would be able to monitor their employees' concentration.

This paper presents key principles and solutions to the challenges faced in designing a domain-specific conversational agent for the legal domain. It includes issues of scope, platform, architecture and preparation of input data. It provides functionality in answering user queries and recording user information including contact details and case-related information. It utilises deep learning technology built upon Amazon Web Services (aws) lex in combination with aws Lambda. Due to lack of publicly available data, we identified two methods including crowdsourcing experiments and archived enquiries to develop a number of linguistic resources. This includes a training dataset, set of predetermined responses for the conversational agent, a set of regression test cases and a further conversation test set. We propose a hierarchical bot structure that facilitates multi-level delegation and report model accuracy on the regression test set. Additionally, we highlight features that are added to the bot to improve the conversation flow and overall user experience.

Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it's hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. But, as we discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers' jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don't need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it.