This and That in Court Tech – February 2019

https://goo.gl/NZgsos

This month we write about legislative support for court notification systems, BC’s new ODR system, a thought piece on AI helping to overcome judicial bias, a new Florida Bar natural language AI system, an ABA report on technology for non-lawyers, and an interesting report on understanding justice needs.

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Three State Legislatures Considering Notification Statutes

Our good friend Bill Raftery wrote in his Gavel to Gavel blog about three legislatures considering statutes and funding to help courts notify defendants by text message or other electronic means about upcoming hearings/deadlines.  Click here for more.

British Columbia ODR takes another step

It was announced that our friends at the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal is testing a new online dispute resolution system for motor vehicle accidents.  Their public beta test is available until March 1, 2019.  So give it a try if you see this note before the deadline.  Click here to go to the test site.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Us Make Judges Less Biased

A The Verge.com article: 

As artificial intelligence moves into the courtroom, much has been written about sentencing algorithms with hidden biases. Daniel L. Chen, a researcher at both the Toulouse School of Economics and University of Toulouse Faculty of Law, has a different idea: using AI to help correct the biased decisions of human judges.

Chen, who holds both a law degree and a doctorate in economics, has spent years collecting data on judges and US courts. “One thing that’s been particularly nagging my mind is how to understand all of the behavioral biases that we’ve found,” he says. For example, human biases that can tip the scales when making a decision. In a new working paper, Chen lays out a suggestion for how large datasets combined with artificial intelligence could help predict judges’ decisions and help us nudge them to make sentencing fairer.

A key part of the article says:

We have a paper on early predictability where we used machine learning to try to predict judges’ decisions in asylum cases. It turns out, we can make a very good prediction as to how the judge will rule before the case even opens, using only information on the judge’s identity and the nationality of the asylum seeker. That raises the question: why are the judges so predictable early before observing the facts? One interpretation is that maybe the judges are resorting to more snap judgments and heuristics to decide a case rather than the facts of it.

Click here to read the full article.

Natural Language AI Helps Florida Citizens Find Lawyers

From an article posted on the Florida Bar News website.

"The Florida Bar has launched a newly-enhanced online Lawyer Referral Service designed to provide users a modern, easy-to-navigate conduit to more than 600 participating Florida attorneys across 120 practice areas.

The service, which is free to use, uses artificial intelligence to instantly connect users from their computer or mobile devices with participating Florida Bar members for any legal situation. The enhanced Bar Lawyer Referral Service platform is an expanded member benefit designed to help drive new business for Florida attorneys in more than 120 practice areas. The Bar’s Lawyer Referral Service provides members with more than 70,000 referrals each year, generating an estimated $3.49 million in new business for members.

“Finding adequate legal counsel can be a stressful and difficult process, with many not knowing there are plenty of resources available to help,” said Bar President Michelle R. Suskauer. “Technology can be a powerful bridge to open access to our courts. The Florida Bar’s Lawyer Referral Service makes finding an attorney easier and more convenient than ever before.”

The Florida Bar developed the enhanced platform in conjunction with legal technology company Legal.io to ensure the needs and expectations of those seeking legal help during a rapidly transforming digital age are met. Among the features include the option of selecting from 12 languages to receive help, choosing up to four different practice areas, as well as easily and confidentially making contact information available for respective referrals."

To see the system go to: https://lrs.floridabar.org/

Report on Legal Tech for Non-Lawyers

Via press release on January 28, 2019 from the American Bar Association Foundation.

“A report released today by American Bar Foundation (ABF) Faculty Fellow Rebecca Sandefur surveys the rapidly developing field of legal technologies for non-lawyers. Legal Tech for Non-Lawyers: Report of the Survey of U.S. Legal Technologies was created with funding from Open Society Foundations and examines an expansive list of over 320 digital tools that help a range of users to act on a legal problem.

Each year, tens of millions of Americans face justice problems that have potentially wide-ranging impacts on core areas of life including livelihood, shelter, care and custody of minor children, neighborhood safety, and environmental conditions. Most of these issues do not reach the justice system and receive no attention from any sort of legal professional. Legal Tech for Non-Lawyers assesses how legal technology tools can assist people who do not practice law in dealing with these sorts of challenges, with a focus on bridging the access to justice gap for low-income communities and others who have restricted access to law and legal services.

The report identifies an extensive number of tools that aim to aid both individual users and those who work with the public on a range of criminal and civil justice problems.

Click here for the full press release and link to the report.


Last

I will be writing about my experience attending the Innovating Justice 2019 Conference put on by HIIL in The Hague, Netherlands later.  But before that I want to recognize an excellent report that they posted at the end of 2018 titled “Understanding Justice Needs: The Elephant in the Courtroom”.

Their report addressed the following questions:

1. What are the justice needs of people?
2. Do people get fair solutions?
3. How does the legal infrastructure serve people’s justice needs?
4. What kind of solutions do people need and actually obtain?
5. What works to deliver fair and effective solutions?
6. How can delivery of fair solutions, which now typically happens in local programs, be scaled to reach millions?
7. What are the barriers to change and how to overcome them?
8. What are the costs of delivering equal access to justice to everyone?
9. What can be done starting tomorrow?

The report is available here and is worth the time to read and reflect on the contents.





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