An artificial intelligence application (app) developed by Ignacio Raffa, a startup founder from Buenos Aires, can now draft a ruling on a non-complex case in seconds, going so far as recommending a ruling to the judge. The app was developed in collaboration with the local district attorney’s office.
The app, Prometea, is being used for stuff like taxi license disputes, not murder trials, but it’s a significant automation that is beneficial to the city’s overworked justice system. The Buenos Aires office says its 15 lawyers can now clear what used to be six months’ worth of cases in just six weeks. It is not meant to be used for intricate cases. “It can help legal systems around the world,” says Asha Aravindakshan, a Sloan Fellow at MIT who saw a demo of the app this summer. “Everyone has a backlog.”
Raffa trained the app using the DA office’s digital library of some 300,000 scanned court documents from 2016 and 2017 that included 2,000 rulings. So far, judges have approved 33 of its 33 suggested rulings, and it’s being used in at least 84 other pending cases. “It’s not replacing humans,” says Ezequiel González, a professor at the University of Oxford who hosted a demonstration of the app in May. “It simply comes to the rescue of judges that are buried in massive dockets.”
See Patrick Gillespie, This AI Startup Generates Legal Papers Without Lawyers, and Suggests a Ruling, Bloomberg, October 26, 2018.
Special thanks to Lewis Saret (Attorney, Washington, D.C.) for bringing this article to my attention.