Utilizing Artificial Intelligence within the Legal Decision-Making Process and Its Abilities to Connect Legal Field and Technology

This Master’s Thesis research aims to provide more discussions on how to combine legal decision-making and artificial intelligence and to offer new ways to practice law in the future. While the world is changing into a more technology-oriented way, the legal field has not experienced any massive changes. This has created a situation where customers are unwilling or unable to pay for legal assistance as the costs are too high, even though that the situation could be different if technology could be used within the process. This research presents different obstacles that the topic faces, which are, for example, the problems with the legislation, legal personhood, and responsibility, discrimination, and transparency. None of these problems are simple or easy to solve, but to be able to use artificial intelligence as a part of the legal decision-making process or even making the decisions, these challenges should be solved to be able to provide decisions according to the European Union legislation. The aim of this research is still not to just present different challenges that need attention, but to also provide options and ways how to use artificial intelligence already within the legal field. The main point is not to concentrate only to autonomously done decisions, but to use technology as a help within the decision-making process. The document review program is, for example, an excellent help for lawyers, as the program goes through masses of documents in just seconds and can highlight the essential parts from the documents. However, it is not the only possible tool, but the current trend has also been different programs predicting the outcomes of legal cases, which therefore would bring the consumer a possibility to estimate its abilities to win a case. These all are great assistance for the lawyers, and by helping in reducing costs and giving more accuracy to the decisions, these are also great for the customers as well. Therefore, artificial intelligence will not somehow magically take lawyers’ place and make all the decisions by themselves, as there are a lot of different challenges still to overcome, but artificial intelligence can already in the near future give much more assistance for the lawyers within the decision-making process and enable faster and more accurate outcomes. Hence, it is also inevitable that technology and artificial intelligence will take its place even in the legal field. But it will not mean that artificial intelligence would make all the decisions by itself and lawyers would not be needed anymore in the future. Therefore, artificial intelligence will take its place in the legal field and assist lawyers, but it will not do at least on the large-scale legal decisions by itself, but works more as an assistant for the lawyers