28 June 2023 Lawyers and artificial intelligence: the triumph of empathy Not a day goes by without artificial intelligence being mentioned and the phenomenon involves lawyers too. In the decision issued on 27th March 2023 in the Corte Superior de Justicia De Lima Sur the Judge expressly declared to have calculated the maintenance allowance in a marital separation lawsuit by using artificial intelligence. In Texas, federal Judge Brantley Starr banned lawyers from submitting in court acts created by artificial intelligence without first having verified the fairness of the sources, after a lawyer had presented a defense, prepared with artificial intelligence, citing previous cases resulted to be nonexistent. Systems often offer wrong answers due to errors technically called “hallucinations”. According to a recent study of Goldman Sachs – a company working worldwide in the management of titles and capital investments – about a quarter of the activities actually carried out by lawyers will be automated thanks to artificial intelligence. To this day AI is being used mainly for juridical searches, more detailed and articulated than classic searches on databases through keywords. With these systems, the starting point is a question asked to the machine, which then elaborates it and, based on it and not on set keywords, provides a selection of previous similar solved cases, or an answer. Contracts is another field where AI is used. Even here one can ask the system to write clauses related to a specific type of agreement or to provide a base model to work on. In both cases, artificial intelligence does not provide a finished work, ready to use, but a baseline work on which professionals intervene, or from where they can draw inspiration, and then proceed to a personal elaboration. It cannot be excluded though that these systems will evolve and be able to provide correct answers even under a broader spectrum. But, if so, what will be left to the profession of lawyer? Maybe the better part. The most relevant part of our job is the relationship with clients, how to strategically advise them, understanding their purposes and helping them to reach their goals in the best way, but most of all there is the human relationship in its most profound meaning. There is empathy, participation in the story of the client, human or entrepreneurial. If in the future one will still address a lawyer, it would probably be for this added value, that we should all learn to improve, whatever our job is. This is what, among all other aspects, make us superior to machines. Laura Turini Categories Digital & IP Eventi Non categorizzato Turini News
