LTN Roundtables

LTN 2018 Roundtables

The 2018 series of roundtables took place the evening before the Legal Technology North Conference and were kindly supported by The University of Sheffield. Thank you to everyone who participated in these events.

Thank you especially to Kerry Swain and Lucinda Bower from The University of Sheffield for their help and support, in both hosting and organising the roundtables.

Access to Legal Services through Technology

Roundtable Participants

  • Chris Harris – Lawyer Checker (Chair)
  • Sucheet Amin – InCase
  • Graham Gee – University of Sheffield
  • Nikolaos Aletras – University of Sheffield
  • Rob Hosier – InCase
  • Steve Shinn – Disputed.io
  • Gary Gallen – Rradar
  • Jenny Seymour – University of Sheffield
  • Harvey Harding -PM Property Lawyers

Topics

  • What do the panel each believe that “Access to Legal Services” means?
  • What are the technologies that lawyers should be adopting and why?
  • The Legal Services Board believe that many consumers fail to access legal services at all because of complexity, fear and cost of purchasing, is technology going to change this unserviced demand? Will lower value less sexy legal services become fulfilled?
  • Legal services have traditionally been delivered face to face or in writing. Given the complexity of legal issues has anything changed to mean that technology can enhance the consumer experience?
  • Will technology replace lawyers in certain parts of the legal sector and if so how long will it take?

Note: The first four minutes is introductions, skip ahead to 4″35′ if you want to get straight into the discussions!

Impact of AI on access to legal services and bias in algorithms

Roundtable Participants

  • Joanna Goodman – Robots in Law (chair)
  • Jonathan Patterson – DWF Ventures
  • Dimitros Tsarapatsanis – University of Sheffield, School of Law
  • Stefanie Pletz – University of Sheffield, School of Law
  • Leonid Pliner – SAIS committee, University of Sheffield
  • Vladyslav Bondarenko – Vice President of SAIS, University of Sheffield
  • Heather Anson – Anson Evaluate
  • Ruth Beresford – Research Student, University of Sheffield
  • Ben Hunt – DLA Piper
  • Alan Reid – Sheffield Hallam
  • Peter Wright – Digital Law UK
  • Casper Drake – Etic Lab

Topics

  • AI and access to legal services is about using tech to scale up and therefore extend access to legal advice, to the ‘unlawyered’ who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer and do not qualify for any sort of legal aid. It’s also about informing people about their legal rights (which may not be clear or obvious) in relation to common issues that arise, so that they can decide whether or not to pursue a case. Examples include consumer facing applications like DoNotPay and contract automation tools.
  • Law firms/legal service providers are using AI to create client-facing apps that provide initial guidance about topical legislative issues that might affect them. For example, Kemp Little has a GDPR tool, Keoghs’ Lauri Lawyer uses AI to process insurance claims. Quite a few firms have Brexit tools that enable clients to check whether their contracts will be affected by Brexit.
  • Bias in algorithms occurs because the data they are applied to has inherent biases. This is becomes an issue when AI is used to make decisions that have human consequences, such as sentencing decisions or using AI to predict recidivism and using the outcomes to make parole/bail decisions. Bias that’s inherent in data has the potential to produce unfair decisions. What can/should we do about this? (Background: Durham police force is using algorithms to inform bail decisions, and in the US, they are affecting sentencing decisions. Insurance companies use them to make decisions on quotes. A recent report by the Royal United Services Institute and the Centre for Information Rights argues that ‘it is essential that such experimental innovation is conducted within the bounds of a clear policy framework, and that there are sufficient regulatory and oversight mechanisms in place to ensure fair and legal use of technologies within a live policing environment’. It recommends that the Home Office sets out clear and appropriate constraints governing how police forces should conduct trials of predictive policing tools.)
  • Transparency, responsibility and accountability: Given the bias in algorithms, where should the liability lie for decisions made by or supported by AI? Algorithms do make mistakes, even if they are fewer/different mistakes. Who is liable when the algorithm gets it wrong? Should algorithmic bias be made explicit or is it proprietary? How much transparency is necessary/desirable?
  • Regulation: Should AI therefore be regulated? If so, at what point, how far and by whom? Should there be extra regulation for legal AI because of its human and societal implications? How do we balance regulation so that it doesn’t stifle innovation?

Note: The first four minutes is introductions, skip ahead to 4″15′ if you want to get straight into the discussions!

Blockchain and Legal

Roundtable Participants

  • Ben Gardner – Wavelength Law (chair)
  • Jeremy Barnett – Resilience Partners
  • Stephen Ward – CLC
  • Graham Thompson – Irwin Mitchell
  • Kingsley Udofa – University of Sheffield
  • Becky Pennington – University of Sheffield