Wether it's through replacing law graduates, reducing need for real lawyers, or just generally speeding up the processes in place its sure to say AI has had a massive impact on how the law profession works. Though all of these issues aren't something new. We've seen countless governments and law firms implement this technolgy and seen how successful it can be. While productivity gains and reduced court backlogs are surely a big positive part of this technology there is also the dark side of imbedding AI so deeply into our law institutions.

One of the big fears people are having is the concern about AI facial detection being used in courts of law. There have been a few instances on record where police used facial recognition to wrongly arrest and sometimes even sentence innocent people who were mislabled or identitfied. We spoke with Mathew Whitman a lead researcher at the Inns Court here in Holborn. He said this,

"I believe that there is currently a crisis in our profession on the use of AI. On one hand the toolswe have are amazing at speeding up our work and helping certain situtions. Though a big drawback are the inherent biases of AI that I don't think enough people are concerned about. As a result of this the more relaxed approach to using AI has created some complex legal issues with lawyers presenting halucinated cases but even worse - judges using the technology to come up with the sentencing for casese. This has really highlighted how deeply racist these systems can be due to the racial biases in the legal system. These new AI lawyers will sometimes hand out harsher punshiments for the same crimes to minority groups simply because that is how things have worked in the past and thats what its data set is trained on. These machines are not perfect and neutral and are really deeply flawed especially in such crucial cases like law I believe this technology should only be implemented with much care."

Whitman isn't the only one voicing concerns about the use of AI lawyers but his concern has not yet been enough to stop to rollout of lawyers like this. The companies buying these robots claim the gains in productivity are too beneficial to stop using them just on the basis that they are racially biased at times. As companies wrestle with the idea of AI lawyers in their systems the horror stories of mislabeling and more simply keep growing.

The latest on this development is that parliament is voting on wether to ban the use of these full AI lawyers. Though the hearing for this sadly won't be until late 2036 so until then this practice will spread further and deeper into our systems