Technology

Lawyers Rejoice Over Killing AI Court Hearing That None Of Them Would Touch With 10-Foot Pole

Lawyers are not beautiful and unique snowflakes.

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robot artificial intelligence thinks dreamsCould artificial intelligence successfully argue a Supreme Court case? Most folks say no, but if you let it argue that states can stone women to death for having a miscarriage, it could snag at least 5 votes.

Can an AI handle civil suits without human oversight? Also probably not and… it may not even be trying to.

But could a bot argue a traffic court case?

Probably, yeah.

DoNotPay has helped folks fight traffic tickets for years now. It’s a body of law that’s relatively straightforward and the company has a solid track record of helping people navigate it. The modest stakes involved in traffic citations make shelling out for an attorney more trouble than it’s worth. So people show up pro se and get steamrolled. DoNotPay’s algorithm has helped a lot of folks dispense with their tickets without having to go to court by pointing them to defenses they otherwise would never know they had.

DoNotPay literally has awards for its access to justice contributions.

Whether or not DoNotPay was ready to handle more complex legal fights — and founder Josh Browder seems to have come to the conclusion it was not — it seems to have traffic court pretty well handled. So when the company announced that the system would tackle a traffic court appearance next month, it seemed like a natural progression.

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It turns out the company had not raised the prospect of a robot lawyer with the judge involved and had planned to surreptitiously run the hearing by communicating instructions to a human (possibly an attorney but almost certainly a pro se defendant).

Judges don’t like that. Transparency is good.

Beyond the problematic opacity, attorneys also lobbed threats about “unlicensed practice of law” charges. Now Browder has pulled the plug.

Lawyers have taken to social media to dance on the robot’s grave, but I’m left wondering if any of these people have actually been to traffic court. I have once. I knew it would be a losing proposition, but I felt ethically compelled to put on the record that the cop was lying to the court if only to sow the slimmest possibility that the judge might doubt the particular officer if the guy pulled the same stunt on some future driver. Anyway, over the course of an hour, I saw probably 30 tickets handled. Maybe five involved an attorney, and the attorneys all asked some combination of the same three pro forma questions of whichever cop was up there and then the judge imposed the fine as issued the exact same way he did with the 25 poor schlubs without attorneys. Because, like the Supreme Court these days, the outcomes were never really in doubt.

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Not only could a robot handle the defense… a robot could have replaced every participant in the farce.

Would the sanctity of the legal system really crumble if a pro se defendant used a tool to prompt them to ask those pro forma questions? More to the point, if the system gave the defendant those questions BEFORE the hearing would it be substantively different?

Putting aside DoNotPay’s traffic court misadventure, algorithms already run litigation indirectly all up and down the courts. Variations of AI funnel attorney research to the cases the algorithm decides you need. We have systems that advise attorneys on the precise language a judge is likely to use! We’re already talking about Biglaw applications of ChatGPT to create first drafts of filings.  Lawyers exercise professional judgment, of course, but at what point is that judgment constrained by the inputs spit out by the algorithms?

There were plenty of issues with the way DoNotPay handled this affair. I’m certainly not defending the idea of trying to pull a fast one on a judge and if you have problems with a state’s unlicensed practice of law rules, go ahead and lobby to change them — or at least get clarity — before proposing to push ahead. But the way lawyers have talked about this situation concerns me. Because AI-driven legal aides are out there and they’re going to keep getting more sophisticated. Delivering sound legal assistance is also going to get cheaper. But a lot of the lawyerly pushback here skirted real concerns about DoNotPay’s proposed execution and dumped on the idea that a defendant might use an automated aide at all. The discourse read a lot as though lawyers only want technology that keeps them properly installed as the sole gatekeepers of justice.

Even in cases they would never deign to take on.

In an ideal world, everyone who finds themselves before the law would have access to an attorney. But since we seem committed to a legal services model that makes that a fantasy, we need to have serious discussions about what tools we let people use to pursue their own rights.

Earlier: $1 Million On The Table To Let AI Lawyer Bot Argue Supreme Court Case

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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