AI-driven law could be an answer to accessible legal help

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (0:31)
Could AI usher in a new era of justice for all? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.
AI has already been changing the legal field, bringing new efficiencies, along with some high-profile mistakes, to tasks like research and drafting contracts. But law professor Benjamin Alarie at the University of Toronto has a bigger transformation in mind. He wants to see AI tackle some of the biggest failings in our justice system, like the lack of access to legal resources, slow processes, and inconsistencies in how law is applied. He lays out his vision in a new book called Superjustice.

**Benjamin Alarie** (1:25)
I think by Superjustice, I mean this idea of relieving legal scarcity. So legal reasoning, legal help will become very abundant. We don't have to accept the old scarcity of legal help, and we can embrace new ways of organizing ourselves legally, our legal institutions, our frameworks, our policies to better secure the promise of the rule of law, which is a fairer society for everyone.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (2:03)
Yeah, and a related concept in your book is the idea of personalized laws. We hear a lot about personalization with AI. What does that look like for law?

**Benjamin Alarie** (2:16)
In law, I think it means same rights, same rules for everybody. But what gets personalized is the explanation of the law and the route through the law, not necessarily what you're entitled to. One example could be different speed limits on different roadways and different weather conditions. And so, you know, somebody driving down a particular stretch of road in the day may face a higher speed limit than somebody driving on a wet, rainy evening.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (2:46)
Some of the sort of solutions that you write about sound like sort of extensions of things that are already happening where these tools kind of make systems more efficient, more accessible, I think things that we can sort of imagine happening with the technology that we have now. To what extent do you envision sort of AI-assisted decision-making or maybe AI taking over decision-making in some contexts?

**Benjamin Alarie** (3:18)
I think it's really important that humans remain at the core of the legal system and that we regard these technologies as, and they're still being invented, these technologies playing a very important supporting and facilitative role. We're at pains in the book to talk about how to leverage technology to promote human well-being and use it as a tool in the service of that.
That's core to our vision for Superjustice. It's not going to decide on its own. Technology is not going to decide on its own whether we get a fair or legal system. I think we are. The technology is going to make legal help cheap for the first time in history, and we need to decide collectively that cheap isn't the same as fair. We need to decide who it gets built for, who's accountable when it's wrong, and those are choices that we face.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (4:18)
Yeah. What are the risks of integrating more AI into this context? Are we already seeing some of them?

**Benjamin Alarie** (4:27)
The risks of incorporating more AI are really important to address. I've been on the front lines of this with a legal technology company doing tax research. What's amazing to me and one of the things that I learned is, I thought from the outset that getting a system to produce accurate tax analyses would be the most challenging thing. It turns out that that's plenty challenging. We've made incredible strides on that front.
An equally challenging thing is to design the system to really facilitate ease of use by tax professionals so that they can verify the answers, so that they can find mistakes and so that they can leverage it to produce even stronger judgments and advocacy for their clients. And so, I think the risk is uncritical adoption. And another risk is folks who are building these technologies, not focusing only on accuracy, but folks really need to take seriously this verification and auditability angle.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (5:38)
We'll be right back.

**SPEAKER_1** (5:41)
Seems everyone is trying to run leaner these days. Tighter budgets, smaller teams, higher expectations.