How is machine learning used within the legal domain to predict court decisions, and what concerns does this raise?

The idea of automation and semi-automation of the legal domain is not new at all. Legal technology is rapidly gaining interest, and many law firms and government organisations already use tools to automate, speed up and simplify their work. One of the subjects that the field of AI and Law is fascinated with is making a fair and unbiased decision-making system that would be able to assist judges in their decision-making, or even replace them in courts. While believed to be beneficial in many respects, this inevitably raises a number of concerns that demand attention.

In this episode of The Law of Tech Podcast, I explored the use of machine learning to predict court decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with Masha Medvedeva, a computational linguist and an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the Centre for Language and Cognition and at the Department of Legal Methods at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Want to know more? Take a listen to the podcast episode on your podcast platform of preference!