OMG, China Has ACTUAL Legal Robots And All The Legal Tech Patents

I spoke recently at LegalOps.com’s inaugural conference and I started off by painting a picture of the future.

Imagine a litigant walking into court and telling a robot the claim it would like to file. The robot advises the litigant on the total expected cost of pursuing the case as well as a prediction of success or failure based on past similar cases. If the litigant wants to proceed, the robot will automatically generate the complaint. If it looks like their expected value is negative, they can pursue adjudication or mediation, which will unclog courts.

Imagine in the criminal justice system, all participants join an internet court from home. Participants prepare via apps designed to provide legal advice. Judges are advised by AI on typical sentences for particular crimes and if they deviate from the norm, sentences are flagged for review.

I asked the audience how far away this future is. Answers ranged from two to 10 years.

But to quote an overused statement from William Gibson, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Which is to say that all of these examples are actual examples of the technology that has been live in the Chinese justice system for at least five years.

At the same time, China is like the Michael Jordan of filing legal technology patents. Of all the legal technology patents filed in the world last year, China filed  nearly two-thirds. The United Kingdom — home to one of the most innovative tech sectors and host to numerous legal tech companies (like my own, Hence Technologies) filed … one.

What’s going on here?

China is trying to solidify its version of rule of law and deliver justice to near 1.5 billion people. It’s not really practical to educate tens of millions of lawyers to do that. So it has taken sweeping steps to digitize its justice system, as it has with many other sectors.

To understand that further, I spoke with Benjamin Minhao Chen and Zhiyu Li, who published a deeply insightful study about use of advanced technology in the Chinese justice system called “How Will Technology Change the Face of Chinese Justice?” in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law.

With government support, technology and AI companies in China are able to deliver the full suite of legal services and obviate the need for human lawyers in many cases. That eases burdens in courts and makes access to justice more readily available. Besides, lawyers have lots of opinions and can lead social movements that can get pretty annoying if you’re a government trying to avoid that.

Thus, what we see in China is a state-backed move to get technology into the courts, and we see this embraced at all levels of the legal system. There are the sentencing tools and robot lawyers described above. Seriously, you can walk into a court in China, and a robot will tell you if you are likely to win your case and how much it might cost you.

But it flows downstream too. A visit to a legal aid center in Chengdu by Chen revealed a system where you can register, print materials you need, and AI will highlight cases that are similar to yours to examine to help you prep. If you need help from human lawyers, they are on standby in the clinic and have a hotline too. There’s even a live dashboard in the lobby of legal aid cases, which shows the type, quantity, and status of the cases.

Li told me that the AI’s role really is designed to be “assistive” rather than to replace lawyers themselves. But, still, this stands in stark contrast to the United States where regulations in most states explicitly limit the amount of help that technology can provide in the legal system. Even legal aid companies in the U.S. are met with swift accusations of unauthorized practice of law when they try to help provide support to those who would be unrepresented (for reference, as much as 75% of civil cases in the U.S. have at least one party representing themselves). Or where companies that claim they are the world’s first Robot Lawyer get class actions lawsuits accusing them of being neither robots nor lawyers — and get smacked with unauthorized practice of law accusations for offering AI-powered airpods to guide people in traffic court.

Now, let’s be clear that China has some other motivations in deploying these technologies. Sentencing recommendation software, for instance, can help also track whether sentences are lighter than usual, which might be an indicator of corruption.

But the point is that actual legal service delivery can only be innovated when we grapple with the fact that it’s not the technology that is unready. It’s the regulatory (and in the case of lawyers, the self-regulatory) system that holds back applications and use cases.

As I’ll outline in a subsequent piece, this is all about to change very fast, and we’re going to start to see these rules fall away in coming years.

But for now, let’s turn back to the clickbait about the patents. I’m not the first to highlight that China is completely and utterly dominant in legal services technology patent filing. But I’m probably the first to explain what’s going on here.

China is actually the world leader in filing patents on everything, and that stems from a national patent strategy and local subsidies to companies for filing those patents. So the datapoint about all its legal technology patents is actually misleading in that regard.

Which is to say that it doesn’t imply China will be the global legal tech leader of the future. But for now, its embrace of technology in the courts places it well ahead of the U.S. in terms of pace of adoption. And of the UK – I mean, c’mon, less than 1% of global legal tech patents is just sad for such a dynamic legaltech community.

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Sean West is Co-Founder of Hence Technologies, a software company that transforms legal operations. He is also Founder of DecafLife.com. Sean writes a regular column in ATL on geopolitics and the practice of law, drawing on his prior experience as Global Deputy CEO at Eurasia Group.