Good morning, readers. Fortune legal writer Jeff Roberts here filling in for Jonathan, who is a proud new papa. While he’s on leave, you’ll be hearing from Jeremy and me.
While AI is not something I write about on a regular basis, I’ve been surprised at how much it has become part of law and the legal profession in recent years.
The number of patent applications that concern AI, for instance, has roughly doubled from 30,000 to 60,000 in the past 15 years, and AI-related inventions now account for 15% of overall applications. Meanwhile, some intellectual property scholars are wondering whether to recognize machines as patent or copyright owners.
The legal issue is serious enough that agencies from the U.S. Copyright Office to the UK Intellectual Property Office have arranged public consultations to find an answer. Plus, a Missouri scientist is suing the Patent Office for refusing to acknowledge the role his AI system allegedly had in discovering an invention.
For now, authorities have been reluctant to award IP rights to non-human owners, but it feels like a matter of time until a jurisdiction somewhere in the world takes this leap, especially as AI takes on a greater role in writing software code that generates creative works.
The debate over AI’s role in law goes into more fundamental issues of justice. A growing number of companies provide tools that claim to anticipate how courts will rule in a given case. The process involves asking software to assess a host of factors—from venue to precedent to the judge in the case—in order to predict a ruling, which in turn affects a party’s choice whether to litigate or settle. I’ll leave it to experts to decide whether this technically counts as “AI”, but it’s clearly another example of machines challenging human decision-making. The phenomenon is especially notable given how judges (in theory, at least) are supposed to be among the wisest people in our society.
All of this raises the question of whether AI will see judges and lawyers replaced with algorithms—an outcome that could make the justice system less expensive and possibly more fair. For now, the prospect seems unlikely. In May, for instance, the buzzy startup Atrium, which had raised $75 million to “revolutionize” law firms with fancy software, quietly shut down.
The jury is still out, as they say. Thanks for reading—more AI news below.
Jeff John Roberts
@jeffjohnroberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com