Artificial intelligence in the courts

The main articles are:

• Artificial intelligence
• Information technology in the courts of Russia

2024

Artificial intelligence is mastering the courts in Russia. What are the consequences - TA opinions

By the end of 2024, the Justice Online service should be launched in Russia, within which it is planned to use artificial intelligence algorithms. It is assumed that the main task of AI will be to analyze court materials: processing multi-page documents, checking calculations and finding errors. In November 2024, TAdviser talked with lawyers and market participants to understand what the future is for neural networks in the judicial system.

Earlier in the Russian Federation, a pilot project was launched on the use of artificial intelligence when making court decisions on tax collection. AI was connected to the work of three judicial plots in the Belgorod region and began to be applied when collecting three types of taxes: property, transport and land. The tasks of AI do not include the issuance of the court order itself, but with its help the necessary documents will be prepared, details will be checked.

According to Kirill Dyakov, senior lawyer at MTS AI, AI is already helping to translate the texts of decisions into the languages ​ ​ of the peoples of Russia and decipher oral speeches to ensure the availability of justice. This is extremely important in a multinational country, the interlocutor of TAdviser emphasized.

There is confidence that AI is an excellent lawyer in the Russian legal field, "says Boris Seletsky, director of the Regional Institute for Territorial and Sectoral Development. - We have a large amount of regulatory framework, which natural intelligence cannot fully accommodate. And at the heart of court decisions are the laws, plenums of the court, and not practice and legal argument, as in the Anglo-Saxon legal system. Accordingly, our lawyer speaks less and reads laws more, which corresponds to the capabilities of AI.

The neural network will not decide the fate of the case instead of judges, says Oleg Matyunin, managing partner of the Matyunin and Partners law firm, head of the Public Reception Office of the Commissioner for the Protection of Entrepreneurs' Rights in Moscow on violations and crimes in the field of economic activity. According to him, the official course on the introduction of AI is expressed in other things, namely, in the further distribution of online formats for submitting documents to the courts, conducting procedural actions, as well as in mastering technical routine processes, such as, for example, decoding the audio recording of the court session.

The managing partner of the law firm Intellectual Defense Yury Mitin lists several barriers that, according to the expert, hinder the development of AI in the Russian judicial system:

• lack of legal regulation. By November 2024, the Russian Federation does not have clear legal norms governing the use of AI in a complex judicial system;
• lack of trust. Judges, attorneys and others in the trial may not trust decisions made by AI, especially if they do not understand how this algorithm works;
• the need for training. Effective use of AI requires training of judges and staff themselves, which requires time and resources;
• technical limitations. It is necessary to solve the problem of insufficient accuracy in predicting the outcomes of cases and the difficulty of solving simple legal issues;
• ethical and social issues. According to Mitin, it must be taken into account that algorithms can concern decision-making and the possibility of bias;
• problems with data transmission. The use of AI involves considering a large amount of personal and confidential data. This poses risks to data protection and can lead to legal consequences in the event of information leaks.

Ekaterina Tsibizova, managing partner of the law firm Tsibizova & Partners, draws attention to the fact that AI, which helps in making court decisions, will be based on the data to which it has access and analyze them using the same algorithm. This means that each time the decision issued by him will be the same, and it will also be impossible to revise it. Therefore, it is important that the work of AI is then necessarily controlled by the judge, Tsibizova believes.

Lawyers interviewed by TAdviser agree that the use of artificial intelligence in justice requires clear regulation and security. In the case of errors made by AI, there may be a question of who is responsible for these errors - developers, judges or other participants in the process. At the same time, experts generally welcome the application of digital technologies in justice, since they can unload judges and other employees of the judicial system.

The general director of the Ponomareva Group law firm, Yulia Ponomareva, is confident that AI is able to analyze large-scale data sets, revealing complex relationships and patterns that are not available for traditional analysis. This could dramatically change approaches to assessing evidence and would require the creation of a new legal regulation for the use of AI in litigation, the lawyer added.

Chairman of the Council of Judges of the Russian Federation Viktor Momotov previously outlined his position on the use of artificial intelligence in justice. According to him, AI in sentencing is alien to the principles of justice and humanism, and it cannot reveal the meaning, spirit of legislation. Only a person can do this, Momotov said.

Be that as it may, the replacement or even addition of a person in legal proceedings is, first of all, a restructuring of the legal framework, which is very difficult, - summed up the lawyer of the Rostov Regional Bar Association (ROCA) "Advisor" Stanislav Batmanov.

Judges in Kazakhstan began to use artificial intelligence to reduce the consideration of cases from 3 days to 10 minutes

In August 2024, it became known that the active introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) in lawsuits began in Kazakhstan, which made it possible to significantly reduce the time for considering administrative cases. Now decisions on such cases can be made in 10 minutes instead of three days, as it was before. This innovation became possible thanks to the introduction of a neural network, which has already begun to be used in the courts of the republic. Read more here.

Brazilian courts start using ChatGPT to save money

In mid-June 2024, the Brazilian Government announced that the judiciary would use OpenAI services, including ChatGPT, to speed up the review and analysis of thousands of lawsuits in order to avoid costly legal costs that place a heavy burden on the federal budget. The AI system will identify lawsuits that require immediate intervention, as well as analyze trends and potential impact zones, sending the results to the attorney general. More detailed here.

2022

Courts have begun using a system that recognizes strangers' voices on records better than people

On November 7, 2022, an interdisciplinary international team consisting of forensic scientists, lawyers, psychologists and linguists from Australia, the UK and Chile developed and implemented an AI system capable of recognizing the voices of strangers on audio recordings better than humans. As evidence of the effectiveness of their development, the experts compared the accuracy of the recording speaker's identification by individual listeners (e.g., judges or jury members) with the accuracy of a voice forensic comparison system based on state-of-the-art automatic speaker recognition technology.

In most English-speaking countries, expert testimony is only accepted in court if it could potentially help a judge or jury decide. If the identification of the recording speaker by the judge or jury is equally accurate or more accurate than the comparative analysis of the voice conducted by the forensic expert, then the testimony of the forensic expert will not be acceptable.

Courts have begun using a system that recognizes voices

The recording of the interrogator's voice was a phone call with background office noise, and the recording of the suspect's voice was a police interrogation conducted indoors with an echo and background noise of the ventilation system.

The forensic voice comparison system performed better than all 226 listeners involved in the testing.

The research team consisted of forensic scientists, jurists, experimental psychologists and phoneticists from the UK, Australia and Chile.

Study author Dr Kristy A Martire, from the University of New South Wales School of Psychology, said:

Past experiences where we have successfully recognized familiar announcers, such as family members or friends, can lead us to believe we are better at recognizing unfamiliar voices than we actually are. This study shows that no matter how capable a listener has in recognizing familiar announcers, his ability to identify unfamiliar announcers is unlikely to be better than the voice forensic comparison system.

Study co-author Professor Gary Edmond, from the University of New South Wales School of Law, said:

Unambiguous scientific evidence suggests that identifying unfamiliar announcers by listeners is unexpectedly difficult and far more error-prone than was appreciated by judges and others. We should not encourage or allow non-specialists, including judges and jurors, to engage in identifying the announcer with unjustified errors. Instead, we must resort to the services of real experts: forensic specialists who use empirically proven and obviously reliable systems of forensic voice comparisons.[1]

In China, artificial intelligence began to pass court sentences

In mid-July 2022, artificial intelligence first became the compiler of the text of the indictment, which will be presented to the criminal in court. The machine learning system can automatically scan court cases for references, recommend laws and regulations to a judge, draft legal documents and correct what it considers human errors in a sentence. Read more here.

2021: Robot prosecutor created in China

Chinese experts announced the creation of the world's first robotic prosecutor using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to bring charges in criminal cases. This became known on December 27, 2021. Read more here.

2017

Developments in the field of artificial intelligence will help radically change the judicial system, make it fairer and more free from corruption schemes. This opinion was expressed in the summer of 2017 by Vladimir Krylov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Technical Consultant at Artezio.

The scientist believes that the already existing solutions in the field of AI can be successfully applied in various spheres of economics and public life. The expert points out that AI is successfully used in medicine, but in the future it can completely change the judicial system.

"Daily viewing news reports about developments in the field of AI, you are only amazed at the inexhaustible imagination and fruitfulness of researchers and developers in this area. Reports of scientific research are constantly alternating with publications about new products breaking into the market and reports of amazing results obtained through the use of AI in various fields. If we talk about the expected events accompanied by a noticeable hype in the media, in which AI will again become a news hero, then I probably will not risk making technological forecasts. I can assume that the next event will be the appearance of somewhere extremely competent court in the form of artificial intelligence, fair and incorruptible. This will happen, apparently, in 2020-2025. And the processes that will take place in this court will lead to unexpected reflections and the desire of many people to transfer to AI most of the processes of managing human society. "

The scientist recognizes the use of artificial intelligence in the judicial system as a "logical step" to develop legislative equality and justice. The machine mind is not subject to corruption and emotion, can clearly adhere to the legislative framework and make decisions taking into account many factors, including the data that characterize the participants in the dispute. By analogy with the medical field, robot judges can operate with big data from public service repositories. It can be assumed that machine intelligence will be able to quickly process data and take into account significantly more factors than a human judge.

Psychological experts, however, believe that the lack of an emotional component when considering court cases will negatively affect the quality of the decision. The verdict of the machine court may be too straightforward, not taking into account the importance of people's feelings and moods.

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