Henri Arslanian for TEDxTalks, posted 20/11/2017
Arslanian discusses some of the obstacles to legal services that exist today and some examples of how technology can make legal services more accessible and the impact this is likely to have.
- Most people do not have access to legal services, Arslanian suggests this issue could be lessened by using legal technologies (RegTech and LawTech) to deliver legal services and tackle regulatory burdens more efficiently and effectively.
- Legal Chatbots – Allow for a robot lawyer to give basic legal advice to the public over an app (through decision trees) to explain rights and advise the individual. This will make law more accessible. Voice recognition technology will help this service be accessible to those that are illiterate.
- A significant amount of a lawyer’s time is used finding cases which creates a time and cost barrier to legal services being accessible. AI can now search case law to flag and summarise key cases based on key terms and context, significantly reducing the time needed for cases, making the work more cost effective and affordable.
- Money laundering is a major issue that is costly, time consuming and difficult to prevent. AI is helping to analyse patterns from large amounts of data to stop this practice.
- Blockchain technology – A decentralised dataplace that is immutable, and consensus based. This removes the need for lawyers or notaries in buying and selling properties (reducing the price to do so) and prevents corrupt government officials from amending land titles.
- Enforcing contracts is difficult and inaccessible. “smart contracts” are programming code on certain blockchains, notably, the Ethereum blockchain. This allows you to facilitate and execute contracts using only blockchain technology while the smart contract code sets the rules, obligations and benefits of the contract and will automatically execute them on the occurrence of certain events.
Any mistakes, innaccuracies or misrepresentations are entirely my own error for which I take sole responsibility and will rectify upon becoming aware of the situation.
Rachel Lawson – I am a 2nd year Scots Law student at the University of Dundee, the 2019 recipient of the Harold How memorial award (for most meritorious first year law student) and have an avid interest in how the legal field will develop in the coming years and technologys impact on this.
Law, Technology and Innovation 