The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- Kentucky public defenders are using A.I. to accelerate their case work.
- Not just any A.I., however: those attorneys use JusticeText, A.I. that is exclusive to public defenders.
- The idea here is that the A.I. can help the justice system accelerate through cases to catch up on the long waiting list of cases that need addressing.
- Some public defenders also believe that this will be of help to defendants without access to costly legal aid, and so dependent on quality public-advocacy legal aid.
- JusticeText can do things like create transcriptions or clips from 911 calls.
So What Is JusticeText?
A pair of University of Chicago students developed this A.I. tool, with the idea that it can level the playing field for people who cannot afford costly defense attorneys and must rely on public defenders to make their case for them. You can read the company’s mission statement here.
Part of the idea here is that while A.I. like face-recognition technology and predictive policing tools that police departments employ can facilitate and accelerate arrests, there is a dearth of A.I. that can help those who get arrested defend themselves in the criminal-justice system.
Enter JusticeText, which does not replace public defenders so much as assist them in certain areas of the case-building process (specifically, the evidence-review phase)
What Does JusticeText Do?
Some of the things it helps with include automating transcriptions from e.g. body-cam footage (in some legal cases, the amount of footage can be over 100 hours). Manual transcription is a form of drudgery that could take hours.
However, it is the opinion of the writer of this blog that attorneys should double-check transcriptions with the actual footage rather than just assume that JusticeText gets it 100% right.
JusticeText can also create video clips from existing footage, saving the attorneys from having to create the clips themselves.
Are you starting to get the picture, dear and valued reader? JusticeText is not going to outright win the case for these public defenders, but rather automate some of the busywork that can be incredibly time-costly so that cases can be sped up without sacrificing any of the non-busywork work.
Why This Matters for Kentucky in Particular
According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky’s Department for Public Advocacy has been quite overwhelmed, with the average Kentucky public defender dealing with more cases per year than there are days in the year.
That is more than a third higher than the average caseload in America for public defenders.
As such, something like LegalText is the type of tool that would seem attractive to a public defender dealing with such an enormous amount of work.
Ideally, these public defenders would be in a position where they did not feel that automating certain parts of their process was necessary to get through their caseload. But here we are, so we may as well consider the implications of this technology on the legal industry as a whole.
Implications for the Legal Industry
Since JusticeText is exclusively for public defenders, a private law firm cannot access its services.
However, private law firms can expect to get access to technology resembling this in the coming years.
What makes the writer of this blog so confident about that claim?
Well, the idea that JusticeText is not the only company out there that is developing artificial-intelligence tools for lawyers.
Additionally, the idea that there are start-ups that do not have any ideas about leveling the playing field in the justice system, but rather view the legal industry as something that profits can be extracted from.
As such, technology like JusticeText, assuming that it proves successful and useful in the long run for lawyers, will likely become a fixture in the legal industry, for both private and public defenders and prosecutors alike.
What that could mean is that law firms will likely be able to keep up with higher caseloads, allowing for higher and higher profits to be made.
However, there are some issues here that should give anyone pause, such as the possibility that automating the “drudgery” of creating manual transcriptions and reviewing video and audio footage, may encourage a certain aversion in some lawyers to engage with this aspect of the process as deeply as they ought to.
Why search for key evidence when you can sic the A.I. on the video footage? Well, paying close attention to the footage or audio could help you find key details that the A.I. may not view as key.
Another potential issue is that reliance on this tech may also lead to building cases, or key parts of cases, on controversial interpretations of evidence. For instance, consider audio that sounds garbled to the human ear but that A.I. translates a certain way. Play the audio in court, and the lawyer who insists on the veracity of the machine transcription may have to deal with challenges from the opposition that the transcription may not be accurate.
But, we will all have to wait and see how this technology actually affects the legal industry.
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