Reporter: Jack Lee
In the past few years, the legal industry has undergone tremendous changes. Legal professionals have witnessed the rise of legal technology represented by legal Internet, legal big data, legal artificial intelligence and other technologies. Over the past ten years, the number of global legal technology listed companies has exploded, from 15 in 2009 to 1,164 in 2016, and to more than 1,200 in 2018. Their business is mainly concentrated in nine areas such as online legal services, electronic forensics, practice management software, intellectual property/trademark software services, artificial intelligence legal technology, litigation finance, legal search, lawyer recommendation, and notarization tools. At the same time, the proportion of legal institutions adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technology has increased dramatically in the world, from 38% in 2017 to 61% in 2018. In the legal industry, replacing repetitive tasks with AI can create cost savings of up to 91.2%. Especially in the United States, as early as the 1960s, the United States applied information technology to litigation procedures. At present, in the work of the court, the application of information technology has become the norm.
After IAAIL (the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law) was established in the United States in 1987, it has had an important impact on the development of global legal technology, especially legal artificial intelligence. In recent years, with the success of a series of legal technology startups in the Silicon Valley of the United States (such as Casetext, etc.), legal technology is bringing a huge revolution to the American legal service industry. For example, a software tool released in the United States can complete a lawyer’s 360,000 hours of work within a few hours, helping clients save millions of dollars, which used to be done manually by lawyers. Today, in the United States, the most well-known legal brand is not a well-known law firm, but online legal service providers such as LegalZoom. These new technical legal service providers represent the future trend of legal services. They are not the role of substitutes for law firms, but another choice to meet other unsatisfied legal needs or legal needs that would be very expensive through law firm.
However, in the opinion of Richard Susskind, an IT consultant to the Chief Justice of the United Kingdom and author of the best-selling book Tomorrow’s Lawyers, the future Asia Pacific market will play an important role in the development of the global legal technology industry and drive the development of the global market. China’s legal technology market will accelerate the transition from “Internet + law” to “artificial intelligence + law”. Legal artificial intelligence entrepreneurship has become an important part of artificial intelligence entrepreneurship, and legal artificial intelligence products for B-end or C-end are gradually entering the public’s life. Although China’s legal technology industry as a whole is not very competitive in the world, there have been legal technology genius experts like Lu Xing, giving China the opportunity of takeoff. Judging from the multiple technical achievements and application effects that Lu Xing has published, the Chinese legal industry is gradually realizing IT, data and AI. According to Richard Susskind’s prediction, 10 years from now, that is, by 2030, these technologies will help China’s legal industry create at least £1 trillion in value.
On August 29, 2020, in Chongqing, China, after introducing Lu Xing’s newly developed Intelligent Assistance System for Legal Adjudication V1.0, in order to test its effect, a company called Chongqing Best Legal Technology Co., Ltd. specially invited 9 authoritative law experts at home and abroad to launch a “human-machine battle” on legal rulings. At the scene of the competition, a third-party legal expert asked the “nine people and one machine” present 20 questions involving administrative, economic, criminal and other aspects. The average response time of the nine experts was 40 minutes, and the accuracy rate was 69%-80%, while the response time of Intelligent Assistance System for Legal Adjudication V1.0 was 3 minutes, and the accuracy was 100%. It can be said that the system has achieved an overwhelming victory in terms of speed and accuracy.
The system adopts big data technology and neural network technology and expert system in the field of artificial intelligence. It can automatically collect hierarchical data such as case descriptions, sentencing circumstances, and manual sentencing features, as well as the knowledge and experience of law experts and judges in case judgments and relevant precedents. After the system’s autonomous learning, it forms a human-like simulation thinking and recognizes intentions, and then makes inference decisions based on related computing models.
It is understood that the developer of this system, Partner Lawyer of Shanghai Cen Law & Partners, Director of Legal Sociology Committee of Chinese Sociological Association, Executive Vice President of Chinese Society of International Law, Mr. Lu Xing is a well-known law expert in China. Previously, the law theory system of “Z-type Resonance” proposed by him has caused great attention on a global scale, providing extremely effective theoretical support for the construction of the law theory system, the improvement of the legal system, and the settlement of litigation cases in China and even many other countries. On this basis, he deeply integrated the cutting-edge technology represented by big data and artificial intelligence with the legal industry, and developed a number of intelligent technological achievements that can be applied to the determination of infringement, legal compensation, legislation, and legal rulings. In addition to Intelligent Assistance System for Legal Adjudication V1.0, Intelligent Legislation and Bill Evaluation Cloud Platform Based on Hybrid Expert System V1.0, Legal Compensation Value Evaluation System Based on Deep Belief Network V1.0, Intellectual Property Infringement Analysis System Based on Open Data Mining V1.0 are also extremely innovative and ground-breaking, and because their release time is earlier than Intelligent Assistance System for Legal Adjudication V1.0, these technologies have been promoted and applied on a large scale and have created very significant economic value. For example, Intelligent Legislation and Bill Evaluation Cloud Platform Based on Hybrid Expert System V1.0. This technological achievement can be said to faithfully implement the “Z-type Resonance” law theory. A country, whether it is a civil law system or a maritime law system, can use this technology to evaluate its own laws and provide data support for new legislation. Specifically, it can collect data on the basic national conditions, social status, and legal development status of the country where the user is located. Then it evaluates legislative behavior and current laws from various dimensions through expert systems covering different types of diagnosis, interpretation, prediction, planning, decision-making, etc., so that the legislative behavior has a strong directionality.
According to Richard Susskind, the United Kingdom has invested 1 billion pounds in the construction of the digital system of the court, but has not yet begun to use artificial intelligence systems to judge cases. In the context of increasingly digitized communication scenes, online identity recognition, audio and video technologies, and artificial intelligence technologies can already provide technical support for the construction of intelligent online courts. And China also released the National Strategic Outline of Information Development in July 2016, stating that it will “build a smart court, improve the informatization level of all aspects of case acceptance, trial, execution, and supervision, promote the disclosure of law enforcement and judicial information, and promote judicial fairness and justice”.
Obviously, whether it is law firms and lawyers, courts, or parties and end consumers, legal intelligence technology with big data and artificial intelligence as the core technology will become the core technology of the legal industry in the future. For lawyers, future legal practices such as legal search, case management, and legal document writing will be mainly completed through artificial intelligence systems with intelligent interactive interfaces, just like doctors have to use various complex medical devices to complete medical activities. For the courts, the digitization and onlineization of judicial trials means that similar case retrieval, judgment writing, evidence analysis and reasoning will also be carried out with the assistance of legal artificial intelligence, or even replaced. For end users, an interactive Internet-based question and answer system can communicate with users in the form of text or voice dialogue, and generate required legal information, or guide them to complete basic legal documents.
It is conceivable that in the next 10 years, after a long period of incubation and practice, legal intelligence technology will advance at an astonishing speed and eventually dominate legal practice, which may lead to “structural adjustments” in law firms worldwide, and the legal service market will face tremendous changes. Some people say that the best way to foresee the future is to create the future. In this process, Chinese legal science and technology experts represented by Lu Xing are bound to play the role of innovation leaders. We will look forward to it.
(Syndicated press content is neither written, edited or endorsed by ED Times)
