Slashdot Mirror
Taking the Lawyers Out of the Loop
An Associated Press story carried by the Christian Science Monitor suggests that expert systems can already replace lawyers in a great many disputes (especially low-level ones, where the disputants don't need or don't want to see each other), and the realm of legal expertise that can be embodied in silicon will only grow. The article spends most of its time on Modria, a company whose software is being used in Ohio to "resolve disputes over tax assessments and keep them out of court, and a New York-based arbitration association has deployed it to settle medical claims arising from certain types of car crashes," but mentions a few others as well. Modria's software has also been used to negotiate hundreds of divorces in the Netherlands, including ones with areas of dispute: "If they reach a resolution, they can print up divorce papers that are then reviewed by an attorney to make sure neither side is giving away too much before they are filed in court."
So if it would have cost $120,000 to litigate, the software company will lease you the code for an $80,000 per-dispute fee.
Somehow, I think the bloodsucking will simply change parasites.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I find that hard to believe. I have had 4 legal experiences in my time.
1) a divorce - (family law)
2) a labor dispute over a layoff - (labor law)
3) a private investment - (securities law)
4) A copyright filing - (intellectual property law)
In every case, there were some areas that could have been algorithmic, but in many dimensions on each one there were things that came about from advice from the attorney on how to position myself and under what laws I could make a case, which has a lot to do with language parsing and the definitions of the words used and their context. Unless this was paired with something like Watson which can determine meaning from context, I don't see this as being anything more than a paralegal replacement, but not a lawyer replacement.
The right wing loonies in Florida have pushed through a law that causes all kinds of nightmares for everyone involved. If you have a wreck you must ask for transport to a hospital claiming that you are hurt. If you do not leave the scene in an ambulance your lifetime limit on all injuries from that wreck is $600. That means if you bump you head just a bit and do not go by ambulance and go blind or become wheelchair bound for life due to brain swelling you still can not collect one red cent over $600. So victims, hospitals, tax payers and lawyers all get into the fray and everyone looses except the bad driver who caused the wreck in the first place. And he may never even get a traffic ticket. For decades we have had auto insurance medical policies that offer ten or twenty thousand maximum for bodily injury. Obviously that is absurd. We do see people who will face better than thirty million dollars in medical losses alone not to mention loss of earnings and being in pain in intensive care nursing homes for life. Yet real medical liability insurance is considered too expensive and in fact would take 99% of people off the roads as drivers.
IAAL and a programmer. Let me start by saying: people have been promising expert systems to resolve a "great many disputes" for almost as long as there's been personal computers. And in some cases, those systems exist, but not in the form of legal expert systems, but negotiated transaction expert systems like you see in financial trading and the like. If the goal is always an equitable resolution of shared information, then computers can do it. Divorce between amicable partners would seem to be a prime example.
But that's not the reason people usually use lawyers in transactions. It's for all the other things that can possibly go wrong, including failure to share all the information (e.g., untrusted parties), not wanting "equitable" divisions, interpretation, etc.
If all the world just did the right thing, there'd be no need for lawyers.