ROMA – In the Chinese courts le “predictive” judgments (that is, based on the principles extracted from the previous ones) have already arrived in 2021. The Chinese Accademy of Science is able to draw from an archive of around 17,000 cases, using them to elaborate autonomous decisions. In Peru a few weeks ago the controversy exploded over a sentence written with the contribution of ChatGpt. In Italy there are no robot judges on the horizon, but, to put it mildly Alessandro Vastapartner of the Tonucci & Partners law firm and coordinator of the Scientific Committee on Artificial Intelligence of Assodpo (professional consultancy committee for the protection of privacy), “artificial intelligence will not replace lawyers but the lawyers who use it will replace those who don’t use it”.
First of all, artificial intelligence is already making an enormous contribution to the speeding up of practices: “When there are corporate acquisitions, you need to verify the data on the acquired company by consulting hundreds if not thousands of documents. – he explains Italo De Feo, Co-head of the Technology, Media and Communication department and partner of the CMS law firm – Artificial intelligence is a tool that can help a lot, identifying the duration, penalties, specific clauses”. The capabilities of AI go far beyond those of even an accurate search with keywords on the Google model, so “using particular algorithms it is possible to find precedents and useful arguments for those who are writing a document”, adds De Feo.
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Precisely for this, he explains Francesco Greco, president of the National Bar Council“in our last Congress, in Lecce, on the basis of the approved motions we asked for the implementation of a single system for digitizing procedural documents, which we would also like to make available to the citizen. A sort of large legal portal that can only be a tool: to protect the citizen there must always be a lawyer, who cannot be replaced by a machine”. And yet, precisely from the evolution of an electronic archive, that of tax justice, the first Italian predictive sentences could arrive: the Progedit project of the Pnrr foresees that in the future standard sentences can be extracted from an elaborate archive that is entrusted to Sogei, which could be used by citizens to understand what to expect from the judge, if they decide to go to court. A “deterrent” function and reduction of tax disputes, for the moment. For the future, who knows.
“Artificial intelligence could make courts work more efficiently”, guesses Greco. “In Italy there are trials that last for years, then they arrive at the Cassation and the defendants are all acquitted because the crime was not committed. This happens because there is no suitable mechanism to verify that the trials respond to principles of efficiency”. A fascinating hypothesis that at the moment seems very distant. For the moment, Vasta notes, “artificial intelligence can certainly free us from very repetitive activities, on which weeks of work were once wasted”. And therefore the tariffs will also have to be revised, adds the lawyer, especially those of the firms that weigh the work “by the hour”: “An hour of work will be worth much more, because it will only include highly specialized activities”.
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Alongside the undoubted advantages for the legal professions, however, the first doubts and objections are already arising. “It has to be determined what happens when the artificial intelligence gets it wrong. – explains De Feo – It’s like for automatic driving: if there is a road accident who is responsible, the owner, who developed the system? Then there is the question of intellectual property: who owns what is created by artificial intelligence? And then there is the question of privacy: if I enter sensitive data into the system to get answers, making them available to everyone, I violate the privacy of my customers”. think of a customized version.