Utilising AI in the legal assistance sector

Notes

The concept of ‘free access to law’ is not static, and its principles now require a LII response to the renewed prominence of AI

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‘decision support’ or ‘intelligent assistance’ (IA) technologies

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‘Freeing the law’ is a continuous process.

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leverages the very large legal information assets that some LIIs have built over the past two decades

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DataLex

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becoming viable for professionals to control the representation of their own expertise, as a commons.

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the application of expertise to individual situations (the problems of individual clients) via programs

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Raw’ (primary) information used by experts is the most likely aspect of expertise both to be digitised and to become part of the commons.

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in those areas where legal expertise can be effectively captured in knowledge-bases to be used in decision-support systems, can they be developed as a commons, or only as commercial products?

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in less than 25 years since the start of widespread availability of such data via the web, the increase in free availability is extraordinary, and is tending toward a comprehensive commons.

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Tools for knowledge engineering and for creating machine-generated expertise are available as FOSS and are of high quality, but the communities of users necessary to develop applications (similar to the FOSS or Wikipedia communities) have not yet developed. We argue that such collaborative alternative could arise primarily from those organisations that seek to provide free legal advice

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A ‘closed wiki’ model, where content may only be edited by professionals may be most suitable for law, because of its emphasis on authority.

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if they choose to develop AI-related tools to assist their work, they will usually have to do so within very constrained development and maintenance budgets

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ongoing maintenance for applications as the law changes, or technical issues arise

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Problem areas based on legislation, or procedural steps, and where there is complexity, will probably give the best results.

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free access legal information institutes (LIIs) are unlikely to be the builders of legal knowledge-bases in particular legal domains, because they do not have the necessary in-house expertise

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LIIs are much more likely to be the providers of tools

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justify their answers at least in part in terms of the formal sources of law.

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what counts as a useful level of legal expertise is relative. A system may be valuable to a class of users even though it has a relatively low point at which it admits that a problem is beyond its expertise

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more realistic aim is to build decision support systems

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the knowledge-based system (the knowledge representation and the program) should not be ‘closed’

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rule- based reasoning. Rules are expressed in a declarative form

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supplemented by procedural code

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need to both develop and maintain their own knowledge-bases, as the only available domain experts.

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supplemented by example-based (or ‘case-based’) reasoning

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propositional logic

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quasi-natural-language knowledge-base syntax

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no separate coding of questions, explanations and reports, because they are all generated automatically

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Isomorphic (one-to-one) relationships between the knowledge-base and legislation

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