The Honorable Justice Robot, Presiding

Did you ever lose a ruling because of a case you did not cite, or because the Court ignored cases you did cite? Or did your attorney even ignore or overlook important precedent? Well thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, computers may well be doing a great deal of this core legal work in just a few years. The Economist "Technology Quarterly" section, March 12, 2005 issue, reports that although "many lawyers now use automated document-retrieval systems to store, sort and search through mountains of documents,.(soon even) smarter programs (will be) capable of not just assisting lawyers but actually performing some of their functions...improving (both) access to justice and reducing legal costs." An early version of legal analysis software from the 1980's assisted British immigration authorities in enforcing their law. In Australia, an artificial intelligence software program helps divorcing couples and their counsel fairly divide martial property. Another program allows judges to analyze their prospective sentencings of criminal defendants against past experience. Artificial Intelligence employs two common techniques, expert systems and machine learning. AI will draw relevant data to apply to critical factors and then use machine learning to learn how the data produced results in the past. Why should law resist the intervention of computers as more than just storage devices? Other fields of professional endeavor employ it readily, engineering, medicine, finance. As we have seen from the recent Supreme Court decision United States v. Booker, striking down mandatory sentencing guidelines, we cannot live and die by graphs, but "smart software has the potential to make legal advice more readily available, unnecessary court battles less frequent, and rulings more consistent."