The justice system is deeply flawed but technology can help repair it.
Let me explain.
Legal work can be split up into two buckets – process based work and advisory work.
The advisory work revolves around analysis, comparison and collaboration – distinctly human (for now) tasks.
The bulk of legal work however is process based, which is repetitive, routine, administrative and could actually be done through the use of machine learning and AI. Examples of process-based work are document review and legal research. Document review is when parties to a case sort through and analyze the documents in their possession to determine if they are relevant to the case at hand. Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving the necessary information lawyers need to support legal decision-making.
If LegalTech was to do the lions share of a public defender's process based legal work, they would be able to focus their advisory work. This would allow a public defender to not only to defend more individuals but most importantly, to provide proper legal help to everyone they are defending.
The inequalities and problems in the justice system could be seriously helped/fixed with better adoption and implementation of technology. The problem is that tech must be embraced not just by individual lawyers and defenders who it would help the most, but also by the decision makers themselves, government agencies/law firms, who have the final say on whether to bring tech into their organizations.
The good news is that there are strides being made towards bringing in tech to augment lawyers capabilities with technology, the bad news is that no speed is fast enough as there are a ton of people who require proper legal representation right now that are missing out.
Legal technology is pretty much totally inapplicable to the work public defenders do. There's pretty much no documents to speak of in those cases, and the technology won't interview your client for you and piece together a detailed timeline of his version of the events. And since their clients are getting charged with the same sorts of crimes over and over, they already have the relevant cases handy in their previous filings.
Perhaps legal technologies in their current forms are not as applicable to the work public defenders do but to say all LegalTech is inapplicable to the work public defenders do is a stretch.
To use your example, you could actually build technology that would help with the interview process and aid in mapping out a detailed timeline of their version of the events.
While repeat offenders may offend in the same pattern the same cannot be said about all offenders.
Public defenders develop their list of handy relevant cases through experience on the job. Tech can help train new hires quicker so that they would be able to jump in and start giving proper legal representation sooner. The system clearly needs more public defenders.
Legal research does play a key component when it comes to the sentencing of offenders. Two offenders can be charged with the same crime however it could have occurred in two entirely different circumstances with the offenders having starkly different backgrounds and motivations. Due to these differences, public defenders should do a deep dive in research in order to provide proper representation rather than relying on only their own personal list of applicable cases. Effective legal research software would go a long way in helping over-worked defenders such as Tina Peng.
I really struggle to think of what sort of legal tech would help you interview a poor client that may not speak english better than a good grasp of Spanish and a pad of paper. These are not complex cases with tons of moving parts. As for legal research--your example of finding factually on-point cases is exactly what existing search algorithms do the worst job of.
Maybe I'm pessimistic. But the gap between promises and actuality in the legal tech field is very wide, at present, so I'm really skeptical when I hear about how it will help solve what is really a political/social problem.
Well, if the public defender doesn't know Spanish using software which helps them to understand their client is a start.
I definitely agree with you on just how bad existing legal research software is at finding factually on-point results. This was part of my motivation to help found ROSS Intelligence, which is building better legal research software with ML and NLP at its core.
And while pessimism and skepticism does help identify the difficulties in implementing different solutions, it's optimism that helps find the opportunities imbedded in the difficulties found :)
Ignoring the problems with public defenders for a moment, technology could help a lot in other areas, such as:
1. Providing access to (supposedly publicly accessible) court records.
2. Automated document preparation for common situations.
3. An expert system to guide people to which documents (re: #2) they need, or if they should seek the assistance of an actual lawyer.
The goal is to allow people to interact with the legal system on their own in simple/common situations, without having to pay for a lawyer or wait for someone to help them pro bono. This would give more options to the poor or otherwise disadvantaged, who often have to simply ignore injustices or make unreasonable concessions because they lack the funds to even talk to a lawyer. This would even help in cases where a lawyer would have to be involved: it might be easier to find pro bono help if you have some of the background work already done.
#1 and #2 should fairly trivial for someone with some legal experience; there are many easy ways to implements database of documents, and numerous template systems already exist.
>> The problem is that tech must be embraced not just by individual lawyers and defenders who it would help the most, but also by the decision makers themselves, government agencies/law firms, who have the final say on whether to bring tech into their organizations.
Totally agree that systemic improvements will require adoption by decision makers and higher ups. A way to get there could be those individuals and lawyers closer to the problem demonstrating measurable improvements, and tech could be a great way to communicate that.
You mentioned strides being made to help augment lawyers capabilities. Can you elaborate on that? I'd love to read more about it.
Agreed. Measurable improvements means data that could not be refuted which is key.
Check out Clio for project management, Beagle for contract review, Ironclad for automating contract creation, Legaler for better lawyer-client communication, and the company I helped found, ROSS Intelligence, which is building an A.I. lawyer to help streamline the legal research process.
There’s a ton of exciting LegalTech projects which help augment lawyers abilities out and in the pipeline. Not all of them will directly help public defenders but some definitely will. What is great is that they will all help improve the legal system as a whole – which is a huge win.
I don't think technology will help things. Until we change our collective opinions about funding public defenders, better legal software will just cause public defenders' budget/headcounts to be reduced so that they are still taking on the same amount of work.
It's like buying a bigger backpack/purse -- until you change your ideas about what is essential to carry all the time, you'll just fill it up with more stuff.
We both agree that the decision makers have to increase funding public defenders and that their numbers should not be reduced with the uptake of technology. This dilution would simply bring us back to square one. It’s about augmenting with technology not replacing.
If done correctly we wouldn’t run into the bigger backpack scenario as the underlying reason for bringing in technology to help fix the justice system would mean ideas have changed and they would know what is essential to carry – to use your analogy.
