[markogrady]

The HMCTS held a hackathon for the future tech in the UK court system a few years ago. The judges were people like the CEO of the courts, they also had lord chief justice. There were all sorts of firms like Linklaters, Pinsent Mason and Deloitte. We won with a simple Alexa lawyer that was to help poor rental tenants. It generated documents to send a landlord and possible legal advice. The idea was specifically for people who can not afford a lawyer. There was a lot of influential people who were very excited about this space, so it is strange when it actually gets implemented it's not allowed.

I wonder what the wider implications are for the legal system. Will there be less qualified human lawyers in the future due to the lack of junior roles that are filled by AI? Will lawyers be allowed to use AI to find different ways of looking at issues?

[NoboruWataya]

Apart from being different jurisdictions, they are different issues. The situation in the article involved a pro se litigant feeding courtroom proceedings to the AI and regurgitating its responses in real time. In that situation you are effectively handing your agency over to the AI. You can't really be said to be representing yourself in any real sense; you are mindlessly parroting what is fed to you.

The situation you describe seems to be more akin to an advanced search or information portal that people can use to guide their self-representation, or even their decision to engage lawyers/discussions with their lawyers (of course, maybe I'm misunderstanding). That stuff has basically always been allowed; nobody is threatening to prosecute Google because pro se litigants use it in their research. There are plenty of websites out there that discuss tenants' rights. There are even template tenancy agreements available online for free.

Also, what were you proposing to use as the knowledge base for your Alexa lawyer? Were you really planning on using ChatGPT or some other general purpose AI? Or would the knowledge base be carefully curated by qualified professionals? And who would create and maintain it, the state? A regulated firm? Or a startup with a name like "DoNotPay"?

[brookst]

Really good thoughts and treatment of the different issues. The line between “tool” and “agent” is blurry and will probably just keep getting blurrier. But I do think it’s important for our judicial system to ensure that any delegation of representation is to a very qualified third party, for both ethical and process/cost reasons.

I’m not sure the startup’s name is especially germane though. If anything, it seems to fit right in with human lawyers like 1-800-BEAT-DUI.

[dragonwriter]

> Will there be less qualified human lawyers in the future due to the lack of junior roles that are filled by AI?

I doubt it; AI will be a force multiplier from law school on into practice. More value will mean more demand at all experience levels.

[TeaDude]

I'm interested. What sort of regulations do you think would affect the robo-lawyer space in the UK?

Self-representation is frowned upon and mostly disallowed. Lawyers are expensive. I'd genuinely consider having ChatGPT fight for me.

[danielfoster]

Privacy seems like it would be a major issue. As a litigant, I would not want the opposing side piping my case information to a third party and having this information used to train the AI for future cases.

AI could be very useful for helping pro-so litigants prepare documents. I imagine with this use case as well as the oral argument use case, judges are also worried about low quality output wasting the court's time.

[etothepii]

Self-representation is frowned upon, "a person with themselves for a client has a fool for a client." But, where in the UK system is it disallowed, unless you are a repeated, "freeman of the land" nonsense spouter?