Key takeaways
- India faces a significant backlog in its legal system, with millions of cases pending for years.
- AI is increasingly integrated into the legal industry, assisting in tasks like document review and legal research.
- The potential of AI extends to predicting legal outcomes by analysing existing data and precedents.
AI In The Law Industry Today
AI has not been a complete alien to the legal professionals. It has been playing a growing role in the industry in recent years, but this has primarily been in the background doing e-discovery type work that involves trawling through large numbers of past cases to find relevant precedents. They are involved with automating divorces, review documents and legal research and to help check thorough facts of the clients involved.Predicting Legal Outcomes
Apart from the other powers that AI has in the legal industry, it also has the potential to analyse the available legal data and make predictions of the legal outcomes out of it, even better than humans can. Apart from predictive analysis, can also be of help in the areas of legal research, self-help and cybersecurity. It can be deployed to occasions when clients ask lawyers about how likely it is for a person to win if he goes for a trial and would the outcome be beneficial if a person opts to settle the case or not. Such uncertainty is difficult to deal with because of the involvement of a number of variables such as witnesses, proofs, evic=dense, judge. A platform called Lex Machina uses large volumes of litigation information for the understanding of the workings of judges, lawyers, parties and the cases, and help make decisions wisely. Another such platform is called Premonition AI which provides the track record of judges and lawyers to ensure that both the parties have choices based on empirical insights. There have also been technologies to help lawyers find cases and material related to them using NLP, allowing researchers to ask questions in English and further examining the database to provide answers and readings from leading cases. Another way in which AI helps in dealing in this regard is fact-checking, which is very important and difficult, in this realm of legal issues, because of which many face injustice. OpenText is one such AI platform that uses analytics and ML to help check facts from the available data. There have also been chatbots, such as Lawbot and DoNotPay, deployed for people to answer their queries regarding legal terms and also to file for compensation for delayed flights. These come as very convenient ways to help with the general public, without having to directly consult law professionals. Kira is an AI-powered platform designed to identify and analyse data by extracting information like clauses and concepts from contracts, letting the user analyse trends and patterns between documents. Ravn is another such AI platform that helps in organising, analysing and summarising documents, with the aim of allowing organisations to increase efficiency and productivity while reducing risk.What Is Being Done In India?
India judiciary is one of the biggest. There are over 24 high courts and more than 600 district courts. And it is surprising to see that the Indian court gets to see about 5 to 8 lakhs of cases being lodged every day. Globally, there is a standard of 20 judges to 1 million people. But India has a huge gap in this case. Nilutpal Goswami Senior Manager at Capgemini at Cypher 2018 had described his group project that they had done in this regard. They wanted to help the common people be able to get into the legal battle and help them with understanding their likelihood of winning cases.
