Science Spotlight: Computer Science and Social Justice

Lawyers are expensive, and many Americans can’t afford quality legal representation.  Last Friday, Nov. 14, Vermont Law School Professors Oliver Goodenough and Jeannette Eicks gave a lecture called “Computer Science and Social Justice” about applying recent advances in computer science to the legal system that reduce legal costs, extend fair access to the law and improve social justice. They presented solutions that ranged from streamlining contracts to replacing many lawyers through the automation of mundane legal tasks, and both professors were optimistic about the changes information technology could make to the legal system.

Goodenough began by describing the current legal system’s costly inefficiencies and failure to provide social justice. He likened legal representation to expensive tailor-made suits that most people can’t afford.

“Essentially, you take every project on as something brand new, you do it from the ground up and you charge your clients accordingly,” he said. “On one hand it’s lovely. It’d be great if everyone in this room could afford to have a hand-made, tailored suit, but who can? That’s why we have industrial, scaled up processes for providing clothing, and they’re perfectly adequate. Law is changing in the same kind of way under the pressure that we just can’t make this system work anymore, and it’s not delivering social justice.”

Goodenough mentioned a few of the problems endemic to our legal system. Lawyers are often paid by the hour and are not incentivized to work with efficiency. Additionally, the law is written in a form difficult to understand and lacks sophisticated interface design and visualization. Goodenough was part of a panel that met at the Association of Chief Justices in the United States, and he found large support among them for his ideas.

“The chief justices got the fact that the system was broken,” he said. “They see every day the fact that folks are not getting the outcomes and access they need from the law. We had 35 chief justices in the audience, and they were receptive of the notion we need to do this better.”

The lecturers then launched into several examples of legal computation in action. One program, A2J, addresses the need for representation in divorce cases. Eicks mentioned that in Vermont, 50 percent of divorces have no lawyers, and that it takes, on average, two to three years to get a divorce. A team at the Chicago Kent School of Law designed a user-friendly program that takes its clients through a list of legal questions traditionally asked by lawyers. At the end, the client can print out a document and present an assembly of most of the necessary information to a judge without having to consult a lawyer.

Another app, Shake Law, enables people to create, sign and send legally binding contracts without a lawyer. The company presents itself in contrast with traditional law practices.

“We believe that the legal market is huge, inefficient, underserved by technology and begging for change, and we are driven by what legal transactions can and will be, not what they have been historically,” the company’s website advertises.

Eicks discussed some of the benefits of Shake Law.

“You can sit down in a cafe and talk about terms,” said Eicks. “This works if you need a creative license agreement or a programming agreement or a nondisclosure agreement. Shake Law tracks it for you in the cloud, and you call it up whenever you want to. If a neutral third party can maintain this, lawyers are out of the picture.”

Finally, Goodenough talked about the implications for this technology in litigations and legal battles. In many lawsuits there is a disparity in legal resources between the two sides. For instance, corporations can normally afford better representation than the people suing them. Increasingly, however, computation is used to prepare cases.

“This is a great leveler,” he said. “Software can be used to organize and analyze evidence and pick out the most important documents to use.”

The Vermont Law Clinic, which serves low-income Vermont residents unable to afford legal representation, was able to win several cases against trained law firms using this software.

Computation is impacting and disrupting more and more professions, even ones we don’t typically associate with computer science. Goodenough and Eicks emphasized that there are many legal applications for computer science, highlighting some of the big, hopefully positive changes that the future holds for our legal system.