Some years ago the editor of this Newsletter complained of the over-use of the description “artificial intelligence” in legal products: “hyping AI is unhelpful”, he said. “AI is just what computers do.” And he’s not alone in expressing scepticism about the often extravagant claims of AI. Much of the mystique around it stems from simple ignorance. As the saying goes, “It’s only AI when you don’t know how it works; once it works, it’s just software.”
But while there is undoubtedly a lot of hype about AI, a lack of knowledge about how it works is often entirely excusable. That’s because the more genuinely artificial the intelligence of a process, the harder it is to explain or interrogate it. It operates inside a black box. You can see what goes in, and you can see what comes out, but you can’t break open the box to see how and why it arrived at that result.
In some contexts this can seem quite sinister. AI models that assess the risk of reoffending for bail may depend on biased input data, thus producing a biased result. And there’s been ominous talk of robot lawyers and cyber judges which does seem a tad hyped. Like all software, AI is just a tool and in most cases what it supplants is routine drudgery, not added-value lawyering.
ICLR.4 implements Case Genie
All of this has made me quite cautious in using AI to describe the standout new feature of ICLR.4, the latest upgrade to ICLR’s online case law platform (due to launch on 1 November 2021). Case Genie uses a branch of AI known as natural language processing (NLP) to analyse an unstructured legal document or text uploaded by the user, and then to suggest the most relevant cases dealing with its subject matter.
What sort of content can be uploaded? The typical use case would be a skeleton argument, to see if a potentially helpful case had been overlooked. Another might be to update a journal article or check the state of the law for a current awareness update.
Read the full article at https://www.infolaw.co.uk/newsletter/2021/10/iclr-4-and-the-genie-in-the-bottle/
