Panel floats limits for artificial intelligence in Georgia courtrooms as odd cases pop up elsewhere
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In an attempt to ensure Georgia courts can transition into the age of AI as smoothly as possible, a special committee established in August by now-retired Chief Justice Michael P. Boggs dug into the issue.
This article was originally published by Georgia Recorder.
How comfortable would you be with a lawyer using artificial intelligence to represent you?
Just this year, lawyers and law firms have been sanctioned and fined for submitting legal briefs with fake, AI-generated citations, the Arizona Supreme Court has enlisted artificial court reporters to summarize important cases and a dead man “gave a statement” in his own manslaughter trial through an AI video made by his family.
In an attempt to ensure Georgia courts can transition into the age of AI as smoothly as possible, a special committee established in August by now-retired Chief Justice Michael P. Boggs dug into the issue. That panel issued a report this month reviewing the use of AI in Georgia courts and producing a list of eight recommendations intended to maintain public faith in the judicial system as use of the technology expands. The report proposes the recommendations be rolled out over the next three years.
Darrell Sutton, a past president of the State Bar of Georgia who served on the committee, said the most common use of AI by Georgia lawyers is through brief writing and other submissions to courts.
Sutton said he uses AI to create summaries of depositions for clients, a process that once required going through a transcript and notes and manually typing out a text.
“I can now feed that transcript into an artificial intelligence program, and it will generate a summary for me,” said Sutton, who is also chair of the state Bar’s AI committee. “Now, I don’t just take that summary and send it to the client. I still have to take that and make sure that it is accurate and revise it so that it is produced in a way that is both accurate and accurately recounts what is done and then add my own editorial to it, but it’s cut by a third or two-thirds the amount of time that it takes me to summarize the deposition than what it would have before.”
Sutton said revising and fact-checking anything produced by AI is key.
“I think what a lot of lawyers are doing is they’ve gotten fooled into believing that the artificial intelligence program that they’re using is not fallible when, in fact, it is incredibly fallible,” he said. “If used well, it can be a great opportunity for a lawyer to shrink the amount of time that it takes to do a task, but the lawyer has to understand that the technology is fallible and has to be verified and has to be double-checked just like you would proofread something.”
The committee recommends that courts “avoid fully automated decision-making at this time and instead promote a ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach to mitigate risk and ensure accountability.”
The report also recommends reviewing existing cybersecurity practices for securing sensitive or confidential data and updating them if necessary to prepare for the proliferation of AI and training judicial officers and staff in recognizing and counteracting algorithmic bias – when AI is trained on biased data, leading to biased results.
Other potential future AI uses flagged for consideration by the committee include tools to translate for litigants with limited English proficiency or to put court notices into plain English for laypeople, AI software to manage busy courtroom schedules or scan documents for filing deficiencies or even AI-powered self-help kiosks or virtual assistants to help – but not provide legal advice to – self-represented litigants.
The committee emphasises that before Georgia courts adopt new technologies, they should ensure that they are technologically ready, that the new tech is compatible with their existing systems and that they have systems to measure whether AI improves the user experience.
Sutton said he believes AI will someday be as ubiquitous in law offices as email is today, but he said he thinks Georgia’s judicial system is well-poised to succeed in the new information age, as long as legal leaders continue to face the developing technology judiciously.
“I think the rules are well-suited to address it already. I think that we need to remain vigilant about the monitoring of the technology and, more importantly, monitoring how the technology is used within the legal profession and the justice system,” he said.