Would You Hire an AI System as Your Lawyer?

As AI technology gradually starts playing a greater role in our everyday lives, we start seeing it being used in areas that we previously thought to be reserved only for humans. A great example of this is in the legal sphere. Not too long ago, the mere notion of an AI lawyer was something that was reserved for sci-fi movies, but thanks to recent advances in AI technology, we are seeing AI becoming more active in the legal area. Today we will talk about how AI is used for both defense and prosecution purposes and the data annotation that is needed to make such technology a reality. 

AI as a Defense Attorney

In August 2021, a Silicon Valley-based company, called DoNotPay launched the world’s first AI robot. So, what can this robot do for you? It can help you draft legal letters. You tell its chatbot what your problem is, such as appealing against a parking fine, and it will suggest what it thinks is the best legal language to use. For example, let’s say you received a speeding ticket and would like to challenge it in court. All you would need to do is tell the application your side of the argument and the software with a machine learning model matches that with a legally correct way of saying it. 

This application became popular in 2021 and spread across the UK and US, and it can now help the user write letters dealing with a range of issues; insurance claims, applying for tourist visas, complaint letters to a business or local authority, getting your money back for a holiday you can no longer go on or canceling gym membership. Mr. Browder says the last two uses soared during the pandemic. DoNotPay now claims to have 150,000 paying subscribers.

AI as a Prosecutor

In late 2021, researchers in China have developed an AI prosecutor that can file charges against an accused with over 97% accuracy based on a verbal description. The technology was created by the Shanghai Pudong People’s Procuratorate. In a paper published by Chinese researchers, they said the AI technology can help lessen the workload of prosecutors and it has the ability to replace prosecutors in the decision-making process in some cases. However, there are still several hurdles researchers need to overcome. First of all, such an AI prosecutor can make a mistake when handling a highly complex case. Also, the fact that it has been trained in previous cases would make it unreliable in new cases under ever-changing social environments.

The new technology can reportedly be used on a desktop computer as it analyses billions of data stored in its system. The AI machine was reportedly trained using thousands of cases between 2015 to 2020. It can reportedly spot dangerous driving, credit card fraud, gambling operations including theft and fraud with upgrades likely to be put into the system by the researchers.

How is Such AI Technology Trained and What Data Annotation is Needed? 

Both AI prosecutors and defense attorneys require lots of data annotation to do their jobs correctly. As mentioned in the previous section, the AI prosecutor was past criminal cases while defense attorneys were most likely trained on legal documents that were previously written by lawyers. The defense attorney app is a chatbot application with NLP capabilities, but both of these applications would require text annotation. To better understand the data annotation required, let’s explore the image below: 

Image Source

As we can see, human data annotators labeled entities such as people, the name of a product. This is called entity annotation. In order to help the AI system understand the connections between each entity, end-to-end entity linking would need to be done which is the joint process of first analyzing and annotating entities within a text (named entity recognition), and engaging in entity disambiguation. These are just some of the many types of data annotation that would need to be performed to create an accurate AI system. 

Mindy Support Can Provide You With All of the Data Annotation Services You Need

If you have large volumes of texts, images or videos that need to be annotated consider hiring Mindy Support to perform this work for you. We are the largest data annotation company in Eastern Europe with more than 2,000 employees in eight locations all over Ukraine and in other geographies globally.  Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.