robot lawyers possible future

<p>While most industries can predict that sometime in the future a robot would do their job, the future of more skilled jobs has often not felt the creeping shadow of technology.</p> <p>However, last month a competition was held between a robot and 100 of the top law firms in London.</p> <p>The robot, more specifically an Artificial intelligence software called ‘case cruncher alpha’ was given basic facts of hundreds of PPC cases of miss-selling.</p> <p>The human lawyers were given the same thing – and were told to draw conclusions as to whether the Financial ombudsman would allow the case to make a claim.</p> <p>So, what were the results? The IA won by a clear margin. The artificial intelligence predicted 86.6% of the cases correctly, while the human lawyers only managed to get 66.3% correctly.</p> <p>The IA in question is the brainchild of four Oxford law students, who initially created the software to work as a chatbot that answered the legal question.</p> <p>The entire competition was overseen by two different judges – one a professor of law at Oxford and the other an employee from an online database company called prediction. It houses the largest database of legal cases in the world.</p> <p>While this is only the tip the iceberg of what robots could potentially do for the legal industry in the future, it was commented on by Ian Dodd, the employee from prediction, that:</p> <p>“There’s a lot of these cases and the information isn’t too complicated,” he explained.</p> <p>“For certain things like this you can ask a machine and it will do it far more speedily and efficiently than a human.”</p> <p>His fellow judge also added his comments saying:</p> <p>“Both sides could have achieved better or worse results under different conditions,” he said.</p> <p>“The artificial intelligence might have benefited from more computing power. The lawyers’ results might have improved if only experts in PPI claims as opposed to commercial lawyers generally participated.”</p> <p>This competition signifies the rise of technology use within the Legal Industry, and how it is now replacing ‘grunt work’ usually given to junior lawyers, paralegals and those at the bottom of the legal industry ladder.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p>