Judge Dredd

The world of fiction has long explored the possibility of creating a robot with a human brain. But while most ideas are kept for the comics, one country is attempting to mix the two and automate one of the most complex human tasks: making a court judgment.

The Ministry of Justice in Estonia has declared a new level of trust in artificial intelligence by prototyping the use of AI for small money claims, and is looking to increase the size of claims it can be used for in the coming years.

Ministry of Justice deputy secretary general Viljar Peep said the country is developing machine learning to be able to handle roughly half of small private disputes, at first for claims to a maximum of €7,000 ($7,895). And he said that next year the aim is to build an AI system that could raise the maximum sum to handle more sophisticated claims, eradicating a human judge from the process unless the claimant launches an appeal to the robot's decision.

"We have an advantage with these processes in Estonia," Peep said, "because every Estonian has an electronic signature. So we can use more online proceedings within the judiciary as well as a central storage of legal databases… And the general public can use the interfaces, to both insert information and use information."

A couple of litigation partners outside of Estonia have said the news has sparked a lot of interest elsewhere in the market. One partner said they have not seen the use of AI in litigation to this extent elsewhere in the world.

Document processing is already used widely in the litigation space around the world. Kira, Solomonic and Lex Machina are among examples given by partners of existing tech platforms that identify, extract and analyse court documents to create a judgment on what the outcome of other court cases would be, and to see if a claim is likely to be successful.

Herbert Smith Freehills dispute resolution partner Damien Byrne Hill said: "These are not programmes that tell you the answer to a court case, or actually process a judgment, but they use different types of AI to give you data to help you with it. It enables you to use information outside of your own experience."

Going west of Estonia and into Germany, experimenting with AI in litigation has boomed since the introduction of the new class action law last year, according to Freshfields litigation partner Martina de Lind van Wijngaarden.

Faced with thousands of similar claims by individuals within a class action case, Wijngaarden said the firm is working on applying AI to sift through thousands of documents to identify the common themes.

"Then based on that," she said, "the machine prepares or drafts a model defence statement, then files the report to process multiple claims which all bear the similar patterns."

However, Wijngaarden said that as soon as the claim becomes more complex, and the use of AI to actually create judgments is more prominent, people's trust in the system is challenged.

She added that when the claim goes to court, "I don't think an algorithm will ever come up with a judgment, but it will facilitate the decision."

And she is not alone in this assessment. HSF's Byrne Hill said: "If it was a straight choice between human and machine, I would choose the human."

He added: "A big part of a judge's role is seeing and taking a view on the accuracy of the witness statements. It's hard to see how a machine could make that decision, or for the people involved to trust the machine to get them justice."

Clifford Chance banking litigation partner Kate Scott said she too thinks AI will not replace judges in the short term, especially for high-value cases, but it will make the court system more efficient.

"My major reservation is around the principle of the rule of law," Scott said, "and whether the parties involved will allow AI to rule on their legal issues. It's about confidence in the system and trust in the judiciary."

She added that at the moment she doesn't think there is enough trust in the machine, but that confidence and trust may build as AI usage increases.

She said she would not rule it out for the future, adding that she thinks the judiciary in other countries will want to look at the model used in Estonia to see if a similar system could be applied in their courts.