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Does bots and trolls replace Lawyers? Are we going to find a job at a smart law firms in the near future. Well, diverse experiences from the legal technology industry does not frighten me...
Information management tools will surely impact legal professionals. Today, we are only at the beginning of what artificial intelligence and big data can bring to the exercise of our profession. Every day brings new solutions more or less advanced that enter the operating field of the lawyer.... So we are very much involved in our own transformation. With the ease of information processing, we are witnessing a phenomenon of self-jurisdiction.
But can robots replace lawyers?
A program called Lawyer Ross developed in 2014 at the University of Toronto. And in 2015, thanks to support, the start-up was able to move to Silicon Valley, which allowed it to continue the project. Ross has a Limitless Memory; he has a database of all codes, constitutions and laws. It is instantly updated with the latest legislative changes and court decisions, which makes it easier to take into account the latest developments in the law. Ross has the ability to read the legal and non-coded language that a program is normally accustomed to. This will allow the lawyer to ask questions in plain language and get quick answers. But there’s still a problem: the interpretation of the law. It will never be able to make jurisprudence. It remains an instrument, a means to reach an end. In any case, the use of algorithms cannot replace strictly legal work. It is believed that predictive models will never replace lawyers, as the counseling dimension is major in the profession.
According to Lebanese Law No 81 of October 18, 2018, which entered into force on January 18, 2019, the writing results from a series of letters or characters, or figures or signs or symbols or data or their records, provided that they are legible and have intelligible meaning, irrespective of the medium (paper or electronic) and the manner in which they are transmitted.
Therefore, Judges are invited to evaluate this new means of information in terms of evidence and to define the eligibility conditions.
The fact that predictive justice systems produce statistics, probabilities, on the compensation amounts allocated by judges to a particular category of litigants is certainly not inconsequential. But these are not major consequences: the estimates constitute a reference framework, which may play the role of an indicative scale guiding the judge in his assessments. There is no reason to institutionalize “precedent jurisprudence”.
In our country, the jurisprudence is vertical: it consists of a control, by the superior courts (the Court of Cassation in the judicial order), of the legal reasoning of the decisions rendered by the judges. The latter have a wide discretion over the non-legal dimensions of the cases, in particular the amounts involved.
To conclude, Twenty years ago, no one would have imagined that we would be there, thanks to information technology and finally we are well! We have a great job, we work on exciting cases, even if it’s a very demanding job.
What is striking today is the speed of these transformations. It is therefore very difficult to imagine our job, even in the near future. In a time when what seems to matter most is our ability to adapt.