Robot Mediator Settles First Ever Court Case
Legal Futures | 19 February 2019 | Posted by Nick Hilborne
“A ‘robot mediator’ has been used to settle a dispute in the court system, for what is believed to be the first time.
“The online tool, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in place of a human mediator, settled the three-month dispute in less than an hour.
“Graham Ross, mediator and online dispute resolution expert, said the breakthrough came when he introduced two litigants from the government’s online civil money claims system to the Canadian dispute resolution tool Smartsettle ONE.
“Mr Ross told Legal Futures that the dispute concerned around £2,000 in unpaid fees claimed by a trainer from a client following a personal counselling course. . . .” Details available on Legal Futures website
Editor’s Note
It was the American, Lee Loevinger (1913–2004), who developed and popularised the concept of jurimetrics in his seminal article, “Jurimetrics: The Next Step Forward”, that was published in 1949 in the Minnesota Law Review. According to him in his article, “Jurimetrics: The Methodology of Legal Inquiry” (1963), jurimetrics is “a designation for the activities involving scientific investigation of legal problems”. But, on the question of the definition of jurimetrics, Lee Loevinger was quick to give the following warning in the said 1963 article:
“It is unnecessary, and perhaps impossible, to give a precise definition to the field of jurimetrics. As in any pragmatic discipline, the definition will be given by the activities of its practitioners, and will undoubtedly change and expand as experiment and experience give answers to specific questions. The distinction between jurisprudence and jurimetrics is already evident. Jurisprudence is concerned with such matters as the nature and sources of the law, the formal bases of law, the province and function of law, the ends of law and the analysis of general juristic concepts. Jurimetrics is concerned with such matters as the quantitative analysis of judicial behavior, the application of communication and information theory to legal expression, the use of mathematical logic in law, the retrieval of legal data by electronic and mechanical means, and the formulation of a calculus of legal predictability.”
Over the years, the application of science to law has undergone breathtaking developments that have now culminated in the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to various aspects of law. The use of a robot mediator to settle the first ever court case, as revealed in the above article, marks a momentous breakthrough in the application of technology to the investigation of legal problems, especially in the settlement of disputes.
Leesi Ebenezer Mitee
Legal informaticist and pioneer advocate for the universal recognition of the right of free access to public legal information as a human right
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