What If AI Is Actually WORSE For Access To Justice?

Legal industry discourse around artificial intelligence loves musing about its potential to expand access to justice. The ChatGPT guys suffering an ignominious sanctions defeat hardly makes the case that AI is poised to quit its day job plagiarizing movie scripts and step up to the counselor's table. But buried in DoNotPay's disastrous publicity stunts is the nugget of hope that AI can lend a hand in at least some low revenue legal tasks that usually leave people without representation.

But what if AI becomes just another barrier to justice?

We've already seen debt collectors use AI to supercharge the process of securing default judgments against the unwary, but that's not the only avenue for the haves to leverage AI against the have nots.

Natalie Byrom of the Civil Justice Council and the UK Ministry of Justice's senior data governance panel wrote a piece in the Financial Times this week laying out the risk that AI could actually exacerbate a key access to justice problem becoming another expensive gatekeeper to legal data.

The lack of public access to a complete record of the judgments and decisions made by the courts has long been of concern to journalists and transparency advocates. The age of generative AI creates a new imperative to tackle the issue. If we do not, the best, most accurate and most powerful AI tools will be developed by and for those who already have access to legal information -- private publishers, insurance companies and bulk litigants. This will exacerbate and entrench existing inequalities.

A lot of critical legal information is in the public domain, but much, much more lives behind paywalls. Powerful interests can and will pay for that and those traditionally under those heels won't.

Some of this is inevitable. The best legal information reflects genuine work product and someone needs to get paid for that. But there's a good deal of slack before anyone has to raid a private publisher's headnotes. We just wrote about the ongoing struggle to digitize state court dockets. While the analytics built out atop that data involves proprietary work, the fact that we even needed an enterprising company to swoop in to get the ball rolling on the critical work of scanning all this information is a problem.

In the age of AI, access to justice and access to legal information are becoming ever more closely intertwined. If we are serious about harnessing new technologies to address inequality in our legal system, addressing who gets to see and use legal data is where we need to start.

We're only three years removed from Georgia declaring free access to state law a "terrorist" act, so we may still have a ways to go on this score.

AI risks deepening unequal access to legal information [Financial Times]

Earlier: Lawyers At High Risk Of Losing Jobs To Artificial Intelligence Concludes OECD Based On... Nothing But Vibes
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you're interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.