Seminars On Law and Technology IV: Artificial Intelligence and the Courts

Technology promises to disrupt not just legal practice, but also court procedures. Systems which automatically generate court documents are a great step forward for litigants-in-person and access to justice, but their very existence forces a rethinking of the value of lawyers in representing clients before the courts. On the other side of the bar, AI tools that assist judges in their functions, such as COMPAS and Malaysia’s pilot sentencing AI assistant, begin to realize concerns about obsolescent judges, but biases exposed in such tools also give rise to fears about the suitability of such tools for judicial use.

In addition to the speakers’ presentation on various learning points in existing ventures in automated document assembly and AI-assisted judicial decision-making, the commentators will draw on their perspectives from the bench to discuss how the courts will evolve as fonts of justice for a more technologically-developed society.

This seminar is based on two articles published in the 2021 Singapore Academy of Law Journal Special Issue on Law and Technology which can be found below :

Automated Document Assembly: Access to Justice and Consumer Risk by Associate Professor Helena Whalen-Bridge

Judicial Decision-Making and Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Reckoning From First Principles by Shaun Lim