AI Robot judge: Disruption of the Supreme Court

By Caesar Keluro

A smart court is possible. Software is eating our judicial court systems, bringing it into the realm of digitalization and automation where cutting edge technologies like AI, data analytics and blockchain make judiciaries efficient and transformational. We have arrived at the era of smart courts because of these disruptive technologies. The way our court systems work will never be the same again.

China and India are rapidly upgrading their justice systems to meet the demand of this age: digitalization and automation. Chinese courts are chasing their target of becoming a fourth-generation smart court by 2025. This is anchored on the country’s 14th, 5-year plan and it includes a well-crafted plan to build a centralized database platform for all judicial data and a control hub that will cater to all aspects of the smart court in every part of the country.

In advancing Africa’s goal of attracting investments, we will need to strengthen our soft infrastructure. Soft infrastructure remains critical to the success of the western world. Judicial systems are at the core of this infrastructure. An efficient and effective judicial system can be accomplished by integrating disruptive technologies into its every day scheme of things. With Artificial Intelligence, we can automate mundane repetitive tasks in our judicial systems which will lead to better and faster legal decision-making.

As a result of AI’s mastery of repetitive tasks, we can now achieve a 94% accuracy rate in reviewing non-disclosure agreements as compared to 85% by expert lawyers. Furthermore, AI is reducing the burdens of lawyers and helping in minimizing errors as a result. It is poring through legal documents, searching for litigation issues, contract clauses and scanning data to x-ray out key documents which can all be automated.

How to disrupt the Supreme Court

Build a robot judge. This is the best time for Africa to build a ‘robot judge’ that could aid in settling legion of small claim cases and disputes, as a result helping us clear backlogs and mountain loads of piled up cases. We can do more by building a Hybrid, AI-enabled research portal. This AI-powered portal can assist in tracking legal evidence, judgement patterns, monitor the whole judgement process thereby accelerating the pace of our judicial procedures. While this will help in collecting information smartly and faster, this system must require our judges to make the final call.

For a continent notoriously known for snail pace judicial process and also clogged with unattended cases, having AI in our judiciary and other tech-enabled legal systems will bring in huge benefits and boost our economic confidence. This is what Big Data and cognitive computing can do for our judicial systems. These technologies have given fillip to predictive analytics, helping us garner legal insights and predict the winning or losing of a case.

With this AI-powered portal, we can collect data, discover facts, and present it to our Judges. Our judicial system is overburdened with so much pendency. It is time to digitize how we find facts and culling out these facts from millions of records, stacked up in bulky volumes as filed in our courts.  This is the best time for an AI-enabled Supreme Court.

Since our courts have started moving from paper-based to electronic and online systems, it is pertinent that we accelerate this process. A digital judiciary will reduce the workload of court administrators and help them reap critical cost savings for the overall system. Robot judges or AI-powered judicial portals will not replace our judges or lawyers. We don’t see that happening anytime soon. But we do strongly believe these robots or platforms will provide augmented intelligence, enabling our judges and legal counsels to exercise the final decision on each case.

To a larger extent, we think the combination of legal wizardry and computing power in our judicial process can boost our judges’ capacity in delivering better judgments or decisions.

In all, whatever AI-powered system we choose to build to enable efficient and effective judicial systems, we will need to bring the traditional judicial hierarchy along by empowering each individual along the way. More than anything, we must address the worries about the ‘AI apocalypse’, by embedding ethics and explanatory tools in how we arrive at judicial decisions. It is our pleasure to drive the development of an AI-enabled assistive tool to improve the efficiency of legal researchers and judges by aiding the extraction of relevant information about a case. But we will have to do it in a digitally healthy manner, devoid of AI biases.   

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• Caesar Keluro is co-founder/CEO, Nanocentric Technologies Limited. He leads ‘Make In West Africa’, a regional Think-tank. He tweets https://twitter.com/KCaesar,  https://www.linkedin.com/in/caesarkeluro/