ALTS: AI-enabled Legal Technologies and their Consequences on Society

The View from Law:
Increasingly AI-enabled legal technologies are used to carry out ‘law jobs’ – tasks that form part of the activity and craft of lawyers. AI is ‘hard at work in the law’ in legal  research, compliance, contract analysis, document generation, and prediction of judgment.¹
 
Sceptics and proponents alike describe these technologies as transformative, disruptive, and 
productive of change.² Hildebrandt, crucially, envisages that such technologies will alter not 
only the practices of lawyers but the institutions of law and law itself. She anticipates that law-as-we-know it – a mode of existence of law which relies on the affordances of text – will be 
transformed by the wide-scale adoption of legal technologies with potential consequences for 
the rule of law and legal protection.³
 
The legal technology sector is booming; law firms, courts and governments are looking to 
harness the opportunities afforded by AI. Hildebrandt’s warning is opposite; it is important to 
understand the implications of the adoption of such technologies. It is less clear what methods 
and approaches should be adopted to provide a grounded assessment of those implications. 
Contemporary philosophers of technology provide some insights and strategies for 
anticipating the future impact of technologies on citizens, society, and the way in which we 
perceive and navigate the world.⁴ Hildebrandt proposes a new hermeneutics of the design of 
legal technologies to reveal their ‘assumptions and implications’.⁵ However, it is unclear 
whether such an approach can account for the context of use of the technologies. It is not 
obvious that such an approach can measure or quantify the potential risk of adverse effects. 
Complementary approaches and methodologies might usefully model the likelihood of 
potential risks and provide visualisations of possible scenarios taking account of how such 
technologies are embedded in legal practice, and such strategies as may be adopted to 
contain or tame their disruptive effects. 

The View from Computer Science (CS):
The view described above is a view of the problem related to the Law domain. At Durham 
University, specifically in the EPSRC Twenty20Insight project, the focus is on the other 
side of the coin. 

As innovative digital technology (specially AI/ML) permeates every area of modern life, they 
are tackling incompletely understood problems by developing systems whose behaviour and 
broader impact are, by necessity, also incompletely understood. This poses problems in the 
problem domain. 

In the Problem domain, there is a need to give stakeholders a means to understand how
technologies based on ML/AI/Vision can be applied to their problems exploring the 
Horizon of Possibilities - HoP, defining the Envelope of Acceptability – EoA for AI-based Software Responsibility.

This project will tackle both interlinked views explained above. 

Aim:

To create an interdisciplinary collaboration to provide a platform for exploring and testing a 
range of approaches for assessing the impact of AI in the law and AI-based Software.

The approach is to enable conversations about:

• delivering human-centred techniques and tools to help stakeholders explore the HoP and 
  define the EoA for AI-based Software Responsibility focusing on legal aspects.
  To do the the following objectives have been set:

1. 1. To convene two different IAS Seminars/ Conversations.
      Seminar 1: Dr Pauline McBride will lead one of those Seminars.
      Dr McBride holds an LLB (Hons) in Jurisprudence, the Diploma in Legal Practice and a PhD in Law from the University of Glasgow and is a leader in the area.
   2. Seminar 2: Dr Bencomo (Durham) and Dr McBride will chair a longer workshop to discuss 
      further insights

• To form a consortium for an ambitious interdisciplinary project during 2023/24;
• To design an inter-department teaching module on the topic AI-enabled legal 
  technologies

Footnotes

 1.Mills, Artificial Intelligence in Law: the State of Play 2016 < https://britishlegalitforum.com/wpcontent/uploads/2016/12/Keynote-Mills-AI-in-Law-State-of-Play-2016.pdf> (accessed 6 June 2023). 
2. See for example, John O. McGinnis and Russell G. Pearce, ‘The Great Disruption: How Machine 
Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services’ (2014) 82 Fordham 
L. Rev. 3041; Sobowale, Julie. "How artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession." (2016)
ABA J 1: 1; Chishti, Susanne (ed.), The LegalTech Book: The Legal Technology Handbook for 
Investors, Entrepreneurs and Fintech Visionaries (John Wiley and Sons Ltd 2020); Mireille 
Hildebrandt, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology
(Paperback edition, Edward Elgar Publishing 2016).; John Arsneault, ‘The Disruption Of Legal 
Services Is Here’ <https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/09/20/the-disruption-of-legalservices-is-here/> (accessed 6 June 2023). 
3. M. Hildebrandt, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and 
Technology (Edward Elgar Publishing 2015) Chapters 7 and 8. See also Hildebrandt, ‘Modes of 
Existence ‘in Working paper I on Text-driven Normativity
<https://publications.cohubicol.com/working-papers/text-driven-normativity/> (accessed 6 June 2023).
4. The work of Bruno Latour, Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh, among others, is relevant. 
5. n 3.