Last updated on April 8, 2021
New tech innovations appear in every field on a daily basis. These innovations work to simplify and streamline our day to day process. These technologies have been steadily taking on more important tasks in our lives as we advance in technological knowledge.
One of the more recent innovations involves robot lawyers. This started not too long ago with do-it-yourself tax forms and estate planning applications. But the new robo-lawyer tech purports to be able to give legal advice, prepare documents and even give accurate assessments of the probability of your claim being accepted by a judge in various areas of law.
ABC Net reports that this new technology is in its infant stages of introduction in Australia and other areas throughout the world:
“An artificial intelligence platform, called Rechtwijzer, could soon give lawyers in Australia a run for their money by being called on in legal battlegrounds like divorce, custody, employment and debt disputes.”
If this technology is legitimate, it raises some interesting questions for people preparing for a divorce, especially if the cost of using this tech is less than the cost of hiring an attorney.
With This Type of Technology, Why Would I Need a Lawyer?
There are many reasons why this technology is a bad idea:
- No accountability: What if your robo-lawyer is wrong about an area of law and you end up losing money or custody time with your children? Instead of working out the issue with your lawyer, you would have to file some kind defective product or false advertizing claim.
- No brain: They call it “artificial intelligence” and there is a degree of synthetic intelligence to these computer programs, but they will never be able to replace the mind of an attorney. A real human brain is vastly superior to a computer in terms of critical thinking, intuition and the like.
- No context: Supposedly, these robo-lawyers can mathematically predict how a given judge will rule on an issue. But they can’t comprehend all the possible scenarios involved or rely on years of experience arguing a challenging point before a judge.
- No humanity: Divorce is not simply a matter of numbers crunching and precise predictions. There is a tremendous amount of human emotion involved, and only a real lawyer can walk with you through the difficult emotional challenges of divorce and help you see through the fog to make smart decisions about your future.
In so many ways, working with a real human lawyer will be vastly superior to the experience of working with an attorney.
