Is AI truly taking over the world – the law in particular?
Technology has been advancing at light speed, while the law has been having difficulty catching up to it. However, we are now living in revolutionary times as we are witnessing theway that the traditional practices of the legal sector are being remolded by technology. [1] With Automated Decision Making (ADM) sweeping the world off its feet and stirring controversy all around the globe, law and technology are increasingly more entangled and intertwined than ever before. [2] Instead of leaving it behind, technology is aiding the law in becoming progressively more innovative and more aligned with the present times. This is because ADM is being utilized in the legal sector as an alternative to legal professionals. [3] Nevertheless, although this is widely implemented in order to avoid human errors, it also opens the door for lots of errors.
There is a lot of debate surrounding this topic and for good reason – do we want legal decisions to be taken solely by AI and in an automated fashion, when the data being fed into the systems is already skewed and biased, increasing the gap between different groups of people? [4]
How will the law ever manage to keep up with technology when it is already experiencing great struggle doing so?
That is why, the only way for the law to actually be able to keep up with technology would be, indeed, to implement innovative strategies within the legal sector so that it is easier for it to be up to speed. [5] This is where the legal tech revolution comes in. For the past years, legal practices have been further refined and improved by the enforcement of ADM and AI when it comes to legal decisions. It’s inevitable – the more we introduce technology in all aspects of our lives, the more we become dependent on it. [6] That is the case with law itself. Still, reshaping the law in this way brings about some benefits, but also quite a lot of shortcomings. For example, the automation of legal decisions leads to increased efficiency and less waiting time, yet it can also leave room for accentuated discrimination. The recent Dutch Welfare Scandal highlights exactly this specific shortcoming that ADM can provoke. Due to already flawed data in their systems, thousands of families were illegally obliged to pay back social benefits that they had obtained legally just because their names or characteristics were flagged by AI as posing a high risk of fraud. [7] Therefore, there is a price to pay for automatizing legal decisions, but this is only possible because the data that was introduced by people was already skewed in the first place.
AI is quite literally taking over the world even if we like it or not – that is why it is pivotal for human beings to still have some sort of presence when it comes to the implementation of technology in legal decisions in order to ensure that there is some sort of balance maintained, at least until the data will be corrected and AI will be able to grasp more information. [8]
1 Lawflex, ‘The Legal Revolution: Embracing Change in the Digital Age’ (Lawflex, 10 Nov 2023) https://lawflex.com/the-legal-revolution-embracing-change-in-the-digital-age/ accessed 8 March 2024.
2 Mireille Hildebrandt, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology (2 nd edn, EE 2015)
3 Information Commissioner’s Office, ‘What is automated individual decision-making and profiling?’ (ICO) https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/automated-decision- making-and-profiling/what-is-automated-individual-decision-making-and-profiling/ accessed 8 March 2024.
4 Parliamentary question – O-000028/2022 (2022).
5 Mark Fenwick, Wulf A. Kaal, and Erik P. M. Vermeulen, ‘ Future Lawyers: How To Stay Up To Date With The Legal Tech Revolution’ in Jelena Madir (ed), Fintech Law and Regulation (EE 2019).
6 Zeno Zencovich, Vincenzo and Giannone Codiglione G, “Ten Legal Perspectives on the ‘Big Data Revolution’” [2016] UniSa IRIS.
7 Melissa Heikkila, ‘Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms’ (Politico, 29 March 2022) https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-warning-for-europe-over-risks-of- using-algorithms/ accessed 8 March 2024.
8 Lyria Bennett Moses, “How to Think about Law, Regulation and Technology: Problems with ‘Technology’ as a Regulatory Target” [2013] 5(1) LIT 4.
