App to predict outcome before case goes to court

TALKING about the role of information technology in law is like trying to find the Holy Grail. Most of the tech people do not really care about it because it involves something that requires knowledge of a discipline they have none at all.

To the techie it would be more rewarding to construct an online store or develop a game or create an apps, all of which require absolutely no legal knowledge.

To some lawyers and legally qualified people it is like trying to describe Paradise or Heaven. The “yes I know it exists and I appreciate it but at the moment I have more important things to do”.

However both parties and even the man on the street in failing to see the wood for the trees makes serious misconceptions namely:

a) For lawyers especially they are just putting off what is already starting to be a serious tech disruptor. Books and law journals have gone digital, filing and court procedure has gone electronic and the use and storage of paper has acutely reduced. Rekha Pai an IT Consultant and a tech start up millionaire from the United States in her 30s who gave a seminar sponsored by the State Government of Sabah Bandaran Berjaya has said that tech disruption is here and here to stay. She gave examples of Uber providing transportation without cars and AirBnB providing accommodation without having any hotel real estate. On law firms she said that substantial portion of paralegal work including conveyancing like the preparation of agreements has been taken over by software programs.

b) Did you notice last month that the second highest allocation i.e. R 90 million to IT under the recent State Surplus Budget for Sabah. On a global level 13 per cent of the legal industry has now gone to artificial intelligence.

c) Software and artificial intelligence help to stimulate a higher quality of research and more specific and accurate answers to legal issues and problems. The human mind and eyes tire after hours of reading but not the virtual counterparts of the search engine. Not only the search engine can operate longer and perhaps perpetually but it has longer reach to discover cases or precedents.

In other words the research yield is doubled or quadrupled almost effortlessly. And that’s not the end because artificial intel acquires information and results in one thousand or one millionth of the time taken by human endeavour.

At the click of the SUBMIT button artificial intel reduces time at levels not comprehensible in the age before computers and the internet. It is said time and tide waits for no man but not for those who are on the Haves side of the Digital Divide. A very simple example is 2 lawyers preparing for the same case which will be heard in 24 hours on the morrow. Using the latest search engine Lawyer A is reasonably prepared in 2 hours or less and by 11 am he is ready to move on to other things.

After finishing work at 5 pm he is able to work out at the gym , join his family for dinner and hit the sack early. However for Lawyer B it takes about 6 to 7 hours because he is an old school guy who detests anything to do with IT.

He misses his lunch and is knackered by closing time in his office. However he can’t switch off like Lawyer A because he must catch up with other outstanding assignments after office hours, the very same type of assignments Lawyer A started at 11 am and finished by the close of the business day. Lawyer B may therefore end up burning the midnight oil and so who will perform better in court?

Of course the answer would lean likely to Lawyer A but in the real dynamics of a case Lawyer B would also be likely to succeed. There are a multitude of reasons why and the word multitude is to be emphasised and that usually arises from the perception of the judge handling or adjudicating the matter in question.

Having said that as the law continues to become more and more to become digitised Lawyer A and the judge will be on the digital haves whilst Lawyer B will be the digital have-not and the scales of success would be stacked more against the latter.

For a start Lawyer A would be seen by the number of cases he has quoted done the greater research even though in fact Lawyer B spent more man hours on the case.

And so this again will be reflected in the costs as the judge would be more inclined to award higher costs to Lawyer A provided of course the cases he quotes are relevant and not just to make up the number.

Again I say all this with the caveat that case prediction is not an exact science and it can be more complex than rocket science.

Then another point to consider is Lawyer A even if he loses in the first court may likely be able to succeed on appeal because of the deeper range of his research. So AI can do marvels.

A few months ago I was with my friends at the Smart Space, Bandaran Berjaya. My friend Arthur (not his real name) showed me how work has already started to create a computer software or AI that can think almost like a lawyer.

This app, unlike present search engines, responds to a query or question of law for example “based on these facts of my problem, how would the court decide my case with reference to previous decided cases?”

In other words to put it bluntly based on decided cases the app would predict the outcome if my matter went to court. When completed it will be called the MCP or Malaysia Case Predictor.

Says Arthur “if we can build this, think of what it can achieve. People going to court can assess their chances before they take the plunge. Mediations would be more effective appealing to the head rather than just to the heart.

A lawyer, judge or mediator can run the question in the software and let the parties analyse the results on the possible outcomes.

Clients can get a legal prognosis from their lawyer much like a doctor provides a medical patient before the patient undertakes the procedure. The assessment would also protect the lawyer from any negligence or misrepresentation claim as he relied on a detailed computerised assessment accepted by the client”.

The working of the system are unique. The client provides details of his claim and these will be run on the system.

The system will analyse the information and then it will draw information on similar cases and how they were decided in other courts before it gives an analysis on the outcome. All this sounds like the work of a lawyer but in this instance its done by a machine or a program.

The algorithms used in the program will show what are the material facts and what did the judge actually decide before allowing or disallowing the claim.

When I asked Arthur when the system would be ready he said it was still in the testing stage but a prototype should be ready anytime in 2018. I can’t wait for 2018. Happy New Year.