Category Archives: Technology

Civil Law, Technology, Traffic

The battle over right to repair is a fight over your car’s data

by Leah Chan Grinvald, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Ofer Tur-Sinai, Ono Academic College

Cars are no longer just a means of transportation. They have become rolling hubs of data communication. Modern vehicles regularly transmit information wirelessly to their manufacturers.

However, as cars grow “smarter,” the right to repair them is under siege.

As legal scholars, we find that the question of whether you and your local mechanic can tap into your car’s data to diagnose and repair spans issues of property rights, trade secrets, cybersecurity, data privacy and consumer rights. Policymakers are forced to navigate this complex legal landscape and ideally are aiming for a balanced approach that upholds the right to repair, while also ensuring the safety and privacy of consumers.

Understanding telematics and right to repair

Until recently, repairing a car involved connecting to its standard on-board diagnostics port to retrieve diagnostic data. The ability for independent repair shops – not just those authorized by the manufacturer – to access this information was protected by a state law in Massachusetts, approved by voters on Nov. 6, 2012, and by a nationwide memorandum of understanding between major car manufacturers and the repair industry signed on Jan. 15, 2014.

However, with the rise of telematics systems, which combine computing with telecommunications, these dynamics are shifting. Unlike the standardized onboard diagnostics ports, telematics systems vary across car manufacturers. These systems are often protected by digital locks, and circumventing these locks could be considered a violation of copyright law. The telematics systems also encrypt the diagnostic data before transmitting it to the manufacturer.

This reduces the accessibility of telematics information, potentially locking out independent repair shops and jeopardizing consumer choice – a lack of choice that can lead to increased costs for consumers.

Also, these telematics systems fall outside the scope of the original Massachusetts legislation and the nationwide memorandum of understanding. Recognizing the pivotal role diagnostic data plays in vehicle maintenance and repair, 75% of Massachusetts voters approved a ballot initiative on Nov. 3, 2020, to amend the state’s repair legislation. The amendment aims to ensure that the switch to telematics does not curtail an effective right to repair vehicles.

Specifically, the new law requires manufacturers selling telematics-equipped vehicles from the 2022 model year onward to provide car owners and their chosen repair shops access to the vehicle’s mechanical data through an interoperable, standardized and open-access telematics platform. Access should also encompass the ability to relay commands to components of the vehicle, if necessary, for maintenance, diagnostics and repair. Voters in Maine overwhelmingly approved a similar measure on Nov. 7, 2023.

However, the Massachusetts law was the subject of a lawsuit in federal court shortly after voters approved it in 2020, and it was suspended until June 1, 2023.

torso of a person holding a laptop computer in front of a car with its hood raised showing the engine compartment
Repairing cars today is as much about data as it is nuts and bolts, but increasingly, carmakers are locking that data away from car owners and independent repair shops. Nenad Stojkovic/Flickr, CC BY

Safety and privacy concerns

While the amendment makes significant strides toward creating a level playing field in vehicle maintenance and repair, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and car manufacturers have raised concerns about the legislation.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s main concern revolves around cybersecurity vulnerabilities with potential ramifications for vehicle safety, particularly the amendment’s provision for two-way access. A hacker could potentially take control of a car’s critical systems like accelerator, brakes and steering. Consequently, the agency recommended that car manufacturers not adhere to the law.

A related argument is that Massachusetts law is preempted by federal law. This forms the basis of a lawsuit filed in November 2020 by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation against Massachusetts’ attorney general.

The manufacturers assert that abiding by the state law would inevitably put them in breach of federal statutes and regulations, such as the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. This lawsuit was pending as of press time, although the Massachusetts attorney general declared the law effective as of June 1, 2023.

Critics also emphasize the privacy concerns associated with open access to telematics systems. Granting third-party access could expose personal details, especially real-time location data. Advocacy groups warn that this information might be used as a tracking tool by potential abusers and others aiming to exploit people.

Recent developments

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Massachusetts’ attorney general appear to have reached a consensus on alterations to the law, and the administration has dropped its recommendation that manufacturers disregard the law.

The primary adjustment would mean a telematics platform would be in compliance with the right to repair law if it were accessible within close proximity to the vehicle – for example, via Bluetooth. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed that this would be safer and align with federal law.

However, repair advocates have criticized this change as unduly restrictive. They argue that it gives authorized car dealers an unfair advantage over independent repair shops because the manufacturers allow the dealers to access the data remotely.

A new federal bill, the REPAIR Act, was recently introduced in the House, seeking to require vehicle manufacturers to provide access to in-vehicle diagnostic data, including telematics. This bill’s first hearing occurred on Sept. 27, 2023, and the bill passed out of subcommittee on Nov. 2.

Consumer Reports is among the organizations that support right-to-repair legislation.

Who owns your car’s data?

One issue left unresolved by the legislation is the ownership of vehicle data. A vehicle generates all sorts of data as it operates, including location, diagnostic, driving behavior, and even usage patterns of in-car systems – for example, which apps you use and for how long.

In recent years, the question of data ownership has gained prominence. In 2015, Congress legislated that the data stored in event data recorders belongs to the vehicle owner. This was a significant step in acknowledging the vehicle owner’s right over specific datasets. However, the broader issue of data ownership in today’s connected cars remains unresolved.

Whether data should be subject to property rights is a matter of debate. If deemed property, it seems logical to award these rights to the vehicle owner because the vehicle creates the data while used by the owner. However, through contractual terms and digital locks, manufacturers effectively secure control over the data.

The question of ownership aside, the crux of the matter for right to repair is guaranteed access for vehicle owners to their vehicles’ data.

A way forward

While concerns surrounding the Massachusetts legislation have merit, we believe they should not overshadow the need to preserve a competitive space in the auto repair sector and preserve the right to repair. This matters not only for safeguarding consumers’ autonomy and ensuring competitive pricing, but also for minimizing environmental waste from prematurely discarded vehicles and parts.

The hope is that policymakers and the industry can strike a balance: upholding the right to repair without compromising safety and privacy. One possibility is developing tools that segregate sensitive personal information from mechanical data.

Ultimately, a successful implementation of the new law in Massachusetts may pave the way for a renewed nationwide memorandum of understanding, capturing the essence of the original memorandum of understanding and preserving the right to repair cars in the face of rapidly advancing technologies.The Conversation

Republished with permission under license from The Conversation.

Business, Employment, Technology

AIs could soon run businesses

it’s an opportunity to ensure these ‘artificial persons’ follow the law

by Daniel Gervais, Vanderbilt University and John Nay, Stanford University

If AIs are going to play a role in society, they’ll need to understand the law. PhonlamaiPhoto/iStock via Getty Images

 

Only “persons” can engage with the legal system – for example, by signing contracts or filing lawsuits. There are two main categories of persons: humans, termed “natural persons,” and creations of the law, termed “artificial persons.” These include corporations, nonprofit organizations and limited liability companies (LLCs).

Up to now, artificial persons have served the purpose of helping humans achieve certain goals. For example, people can pool assets in a corporation and limit their liability vis-à-vis customers or other persons who interact with the corporation. But a new type of artificial person is poised to enter the scene – artificial intelligence systems, and they won’t necessarily serve human interests.

As scholars who study AI and law, we believe that this moment presents a significant challenge to the legal system: how to regulate AI within existing legal frameworks to reduce undesirable behaviors, and how to assign legal responsibility for autonomous actions of AIs.

One solution is teaching AIs to be law-abiding entities.

This is far from a philosophical question. The laws governing LLCs in several U.S. states do not require that humans oversee the operations of an LLC. In fact, in some states, it is possible to have an LLC with no human owner, or “member” – for example, in cases where all of the partners have died. Though legislators probably weren’t thinking of AI when they crafted the LLC laws, the possibility for zero-member LLCs opens the door to creating LLCs operated by AIs.

Many functions inside small and large companies have already been delegated to AI in part, including financial operations, human resources and network management, to name just three. AIs can now perform many tasks as well as humans do. For example, AIs can read medical X-rays and do other medical tasks, and carry out tasks that require legal reasoning. This process is likely to accelerate due to innovation and economic interests.

A different kind of person

Humans have occasionally included nonhuman entities like animals, lakes, and rivers, as well as corporations, as legal subjects. Though in some cases these entities can be held liable for their actions, the law only allows humans to fully participate in the legal system.

One major barrier to full access to the legal system by nonhuman entities has been the role of language as a uniquely human invention and a vital element in the legal system. Language enables humans to understand norms and institutions that constitute the legal framework. But humans are no longer the only entities using human language.

The recent development of AI’s ability to understand human language unlocks its potential to interact with the legal system. AI has demonstrated proficiency in various legal tasks, such as tax law advice, lobbying, contract drafting and legal reasoning.

A humanoid robot and a man in a business suit shake hands while standing on an industrial waterfront
Would you do business with an AI that didn’t know the law? SM/AIUEO/The Image Bank via Getty Images

An LLC established in a jurisdiction that allows it to operate without human members could trade in digital currencies settled on blockchains, allowing the AI running the LLC to operate autonomously and in a decentralized manner that makes it challenging to regulate. Under a legal principle known as the internal affairs doctrine, even if only one U.S. state allowed AI-operated LLCs, that entity could operate nationwide – and possibly worldwide. This is because courts look to the law of the state of incorporation for rules governing the internal affairs of a corporate entity.

We believe the best path forward, therefore, is aligning AI with existing laws, instead of creating a separate set of rules for AI. Additional law can be layered on top for artificial agents, but AI should be subject to at least all the laws a human is subject to.

Building the law into AI

We suggest a research direction of integrating law into AI agents to help ensure adherence to legal standards. Researchers could train AI systems to learn methods for internalizing the spirit of the law. The training would use data generated by legal processes and tools of law, including methods of lawmaking, statutory interpretation, contract drafting, applications of legal standards and legal reasoning.

In addition to embedding law into AI agents, researchers can develop AI compliance agents – AIs designed to help an organization automatically follow the law. These specialized AI systems would provide third-party legal guardrails.

Researchers can develop better AI legal compliance by fine-tuning large language models with supervised learning on labeled legal task completions. Another approach is reinforcement learning, which uses feedback to tell an AI if it’s doing a good or bad job – in this case, attorneys interacting with language models. And legal experts could design prompting schemes – ways of interacting with a language model – to elicit better responses from language models that are more consistent with legal standards.

Law-abiding (artificial) business owners

If an LLC were operated by an AI, it would have to obey the law like any other LLC, and courts could order it to pay damages, or stop doing something by issuing an injunction. An AI tasked with operating the LLC and, among other things, maintaining proper business insurance would have an incentive to understand applicable laws and comply. Having minimum business liability insurance policies is a standard requirement that most businesses impose on one another to engage in commercial relationships.

The incentives to establish AI-operated LLCs are there. Fortunately, we believe it is possible and desirable to do the work to embed the law – what has until now been human law – into AI, and AI-powered automated compliance guardrails.The Conversation

Republished with permission under license from The Conversation.

Boycott, Civil Rights, Entertainment, Race, Religion, Technology

Black Church, Your members are being attacked!

Open letter to Black Churches, Organizations, and their members

My late uncle, Dick Gregory, frequently declared that "The black woman and the black church are the two most powerful forces in the history of America." Black women are exercising their power, St. Louis' most visible examples are newly elected US Representative Cori Bush and the progressive St. Louis prosecutor Kimberly Gardner. It's way beyond time for the Black Church to assert its power! 

I am the author of "Legal Research for Non-Lawyers," and maintain a free self-help legal information site that provides practical resources to help people help themselves. The site and its content are targeted primarily to Black people who can't afford an attorney, however, all visitors are welcome. Lack of legal knowledge and representation are among the black community's greatest obstacles.

I began publishing Court.rchp.com shortly after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown. Although I don't hold the power associated with monetary wealth, I am exercising the individual powers that I do have; time, information, and the ability to publish and reach out to others. 

While exercising those powers during a recent research project, a disturbing pattern of institutional racism negatively impacting your members was revealed. Enterprise Rent-A-Car has been accused of not renting luxury cars to African-Americans and instead use tactics to convince them to take lower-level vehicles.

Enterprise is not alone, many of the companies your members patronize practice the same sort of subtle racism. While drafting this letter, a news story aired in the St. Louis area about black women being refused dine-in service at a local Waffle House. However, white customers were allowed to dine in.

When my 92-year-old father saw the Waffle house news story, he stated, "White companies always use black people to clean up their messes", referring to the Black Waffle House Vice President defending the company against racial discrimination claims. I couldn't help but check out Enterprise Holdings Executive Officers and as expected, the only Black Executive was their Diversity Officer.

Earlier this year, we also had an issue with State Farm Insurance company where racial discrimination may have played a part. We believed State Farm was charging us more than similarly situated white drivers and they had planned to unfairly cancel our policies. A formal complaint was filed with the Missouri Department of Insurance and State Farm rescinded the cancelation notice. 

A Gallup Poll released last month, asked African Americans whether they had been treated unfairly in the last 30 days. 

  • 35% report mistreatment while shopping in a store
  • About one in five reports unfair treatment in other situations
  • 54% of Black Americans report unfair treatment in at least one situation
  • Reports of mistreatment higher among Black than Hispanic Americans

Acceptance of subpar treatment invites increasing amounts of racialized mistreatment which ultimately leads to deadly encounters with white citizens and police officers falsely claiming self-defense and being believed. 

Two of the largest black church organizations, The National Baptist Convention USA, Inc. and The Church of God in Christ (COGIC) together have over 43,000 congregations with over 12.5 million members in the United States, with millions more in other denominations. Black Americans have an estimated buying power of $1.3 trillion and donate a higher share of their wealth than Whites. If Black America was a country, we would be the 15th largest country by GDP, between #14 Spain and #16 Mexico. Black households on average give away 25 percent more of their income per year than Whites. Black churches take in an estimated $12-13 billion per year, an amount larger than the GDP of 74 nations. Before the pandemic, these two organization's yearly conventions contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to their host cities' local economies. In addition to church donations, nearly two-thirds of Black households donate to community-based organizations and causes, to the tune of $11 billion each year. 

The combined membership and financial resources of black church congregations can be a powerful force in the fight against racial discrimination. When people discriminate against us they don't care whether we're Baptist, Catholic, Cogic, AME, Jehovah's Witness, Nation of Islam, or any other denomination, to racist, we're all just black.

Racists have been using a divide and conquer strategy against us for centuries. During slavery, it was field vs house slave, dark vs light-skinned. Divide and conquer is a strategy of maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. The strategy includes causing rivalries and divisions to prevent smaller groups from linking up to break up existing power structures. Racist institutions have perfected and modernized their methods. However, in the digital era, we're still using the same strategies employed during the 1960s. During the George Floyd protest, the Federal Government targeted Black Lives Matter leaders for prosecution.

As Malcolm X so aptly declared in his 1964, "Ballot or the Bullet" speech, "though Islam is my religious philosophy, my political, economic, and social philosophy is Black Nationalism"…"if we bring up religion we’ll have differences; we’ll have arguments, and we’ll never be able to get together." 

Black Faith Union

The combined leaders of your organizations should consider forming a Black Faith Congress (BFC), similar to how African countries formed the African Union (AU). The BFC could even collaborate with black fraternities, professional, and social justice organizations and request membership to the Diaspora Division of the AU. Representatives from participating black denominations could present ideas to form a national strategy to combat the evil that is racism. The BFC could develop a national racism database to record instances of discrimination to reveal which companies and institutions demonstrate a clear pattern of racist policy. Organized sanctions, whether in the form of a boycott, lawsuit, or some other punitive action could be imposed. 

The Black Faith Congress or whatever name is chosen could also help formulate a black economic game plan. The BFC could also create a national online database of black talent and black businesses. How many times does one of your members have the solutions to another member's problems, but they have no medium to connect?

You probably have many members with underutilized IT and website development skills that would be happy to work on such a worthwhile project. They might even be able to develop a Black Church peer-to-peer app similar to Uber, Turo, or Airbnb. The possibilities are endless. If the BFC started a credit union or insurance company, I would certainly join. 

Religious organizations pay no income taxes for businesses they own if they can show that the business furthers the objectives of the religion. 

Funding for such a project could be simple. If each of your member congregations contributed just $25 per month to fund the BFC, in just one year they would have over $12 million to work with. If every congregation member contributed a single dollar each month, that would be over $150 million per year. Member organizations could hold fundraisers to purchase shares in the BFC. BFC shares should be restricted and only made available to your member congregations. Too many of our most promising and valuable assets, BET, Motown, and Johnson Publications (Ebony & Jet) among others for example are now white-owned and controlled. The BFC over time would then pay dividends back to the member congregations. 

Additionally, charitable contributions from corporations should be denied, because donations can be used as control mechanisms. If you're dependant on racist corporations for funding, it might prove difficult to call them out on their racism. "Beware of strangers bearing gifts!"

The Internet has provided an opportunity for global reach. The pandemic has forced many of your member congregations to begin streaming their services. Zoom and other similar technologies have eliminated the need for the BFC to regularly meet in person reducing potential travel expenses. The members of your congregations are among the most talented people on the planet. The black church is synonymous with music, praise dance, and drama. Just about every major black artist has shared in interviews that their talent was developed in the black church. However, the black church doesn't receive any financial benefit from the talent they helped to develop. There should be BFC recording studios and movie production crews. People are shooting movies on iPhones. The BFC wouldn't even have to worry about distributions because many of their member congregations have quality screens and sound systems and could become part-time movie theatres.

Tyler Perry, a well-known member of the Black Church, owns the largest film production studio in the United States. The BFC could partner with Perry to create content. Earlier this year, Tyler Perry asked the Black Church what good are you? The BFC could reach out and show him. The BFC could organize and monetize the church's talent into streaming content. They could start by creating a YouTube channel but work to ultimately create its own streaming service that the Black Church controls. How about a show similar to Shark Tank where black church members pitch business ideas to the BFC to fund. The BFC could get a percentage of ownership in the business. Religious organizations pay no taxes on their investments, whether from interest they earn on their investments or in capital gains. 

Keep in mind, the Catholic Church is the Biggest Financial Power on Earth. The Vatican has a large number of shares in the most powerful international banks and corporations such as Gulf Oil, Shell, General Motors, General Electric, International Business Machines, etc. They own over 177 million acres of land and that may not include the hundreds of thousands of schools, hospitals, and other special use properties. Catholic churches pay a tax to the Vatican every year.

The BFC if properly executed and managed could bring in billions in additional revenue while also providing valuable service to the community.

In addition to making the private sector accountable, the BFC could create a police misconduct database where members report incidents of racial discrimination and other law enforcement misconduct. Police would no longer be able to hide their miscount reports, at least those made by your members. Those officers could be held accountable and a tool would exist to help identify and eliminate them.

Black church members

My parents were Catholic, my wife's family Pentecostal, my son is an ordained Baptist minister, and I have had close friends that are Muslim or Jewish. They are all kind and loving people who worship the same God, however, they simply have different customs and varied in ideology. Don't allow our difference in faith prevent us from working together to achieve a common good.

An email to some of the largest Black Organizations and Churches will be sent inviting them to freely use these ideas. Share this letter with your church if you believe in this concept. If you're a member of an association of Black Teachers, Black Lawyers, Black Doctors, or a member of a Black Greek, Black Professional, or Black Social Reform organization urge your organization to reach out to form associations with the other organizations. Competition for donations, grants, and other subsidies have divided many Black Organizations. The BFC could function as an affiliate organization similar to United Way serving Black Churches and Organizations.

Some sort of audit mechanism would need to be in place to control corruption. We all know there are those among us who will sell us out for opportunity. 

We understand that many congregations and organizations may not be interested. Partnerships can be local, regional, or national. You don't need everyone to participate to achieve success. One hundred years ago "Black Wall Street" was destroyed, lets build another using the Black Church as a foundation. If the pandemic has demonstrated but one lesson, it's "United we stand, divided we fall!"

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand." – Mathew 12:25

Sincerely,

R. Randall Hill 

Access to Justice, Technology

Robots are coming for the lawyers – which may be bad for tomorrow’s attorneys but great for anyone in need of cheap legal assistance

 by Elizabeth C. Tippett, University of Oregon and Charlotte Alexander, Georgia State University

Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it’s hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot.

And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence.

But, as we discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers’ jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don’t need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it.

Sign on the dotted line. AndreyPopov/iStock via Getty Images

 

While this may be bad news for tomorrow’s lawyers, it could be great for their future clients – particularly those who have trouble affording legal assistance.

Technology can be unpredictable

Our research project – in which we collaborated with computer scientists and linguists at MITRE, a federally funded nonprofit devoted to research and development – was not meant to be about automation. As law professors, we were trying to identify the text features of successful versus unsuccessful legal briefs.

We gathered a small cache of legal briefs and judges’ opinions and processed the text for analysis.

One of the first things we learned is that it can be hard to predict which tasks are easily automated. For example, citations in a brief – such as “Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954)” – are very easy for a human to pick out and separate from the rest of the text. Not so for machine learning software, which got tripped up in the blizzard of punctuation inside and outside the citation.

It was like those “Captcha” boxes you are asked to complete on websites to prove you’re not a robot – a human can easily spot a telephone pole, but a robot will get confused by all the background noise in the image.

A tech shortcut

Once we figured out how to identify the citations, we inadvertently stumbled on a methodology to automate one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of legal practice: legal research.

The scientists at MITRE used a methodology called “graph analysis” to create visual networks of legal citations. The graph analysis enabled us to predict whether a brief would “win” based on how well other briefs performed when they included a particular citation.

Later, however, we realized the process could be reversed. If you were a lawyer responding to the other side’s brief, normally you would have to search laboriously for the right cases to cite using an expensive database. But our research suggested that we could build a database with software that would just tell lawyers the best cases to cite. All you would need to is feed the other side’s brief into the machine.

Now we didn’t actually construct our research-shortcut machine. We would need a mountain of lawyers’ briefs and judicial opinions to make something useful. And researchers like us do not have free access to data of that sort – even the government-run database known as PACER charges by the page.

But it does show how technology can turn any task that is extremely time-consuming for humans into one where the heavy lifting can be done at the click of a button.

A large room is full of women sitting at tables and using sewing machines to make garments, while a woman is standing, in 1937
Sewing machines didn’t replace seamstresses but they changed the job considerably. AP Photo/Clarence Hamm

A history of partial automation

Automating the hard parts of a job can make a big difference both for those performing the job and the consumers on the other side of the transaction.

Take for example, a hydraulic crane or a power forklift. While today people think of operating a crane as manual work, these powered machines were considered labor-saving devices when they were first introduced because they supplanted the human power involved in moving heavy objects around.

Forklifts and cranes, of course, didn’t replace people. But like automating the grind of legal research, power machines multiplied the amount of work one person could accomplish within a unit of time.

Partial automation of sewing machines in the early 20th century offers another example. By the 1910s, women working in textile mills were no longer responsible for sewing on a single machine – as you might today on a home sewing machine – but wrangling an industrial-grade machine with 12 needles sewing 4,000 stitches per minute. These machines could automatically perform all the fussy work of hemming, sewing seams and even stitching the “embroidery trimming of white underwear.” Like an airline pilot flying on autopilot, they weren’t sewing so much as monitoring the machine for problems.

Was the transition bad for workers? Maybe somewhat, but it was a boon for consumers. In 1912, women perusing the Sears mail order catalog had a choice between “drawers” with premium hand-embroidered trimming, and a much cheaper machine-embroidered option.

Likewise, automation could help reduce the cost of legal services, making it more accessible for the many individuals who can’t afford a lawyer.

Legal scholar Miriam Cherry discusses workplace automation with Elizabeth Tippett.

DIY lawyering

Indeed, in other sectors of the economy, technological developments in recent decades have enabled companies to shift work from paid workers to customers.

Touchscreen technology, for example, enabled airlines to install check-in kiosks. Similar kiosks are almost everywhere – in parking lots, gas stations, grocery stores and even fast-food restaurants.

At one level these kiosks are displacing paid labor by employees with unpaid labor by consumers. But that argument assumes that everyone could access the product or service back when it was performed by an employee.

In the context of legal services, the many consumers who can’t afford a lawyer are already forgoing their day in court altogether or handling legal claims on their own – often with bad results. If partial automation means an overwhelmed legal aid lawyer now has time to take more clients’ cases or clients can now afford to hire a lawyer, everyone will be better off.

In addition, tech-enabled legal services can help consumers do a better job of representing themselves. For example, the federal district court in Missouri now offers a platform to help individuals filing for bankruptcy prepare their forms – either on their own or with a free 30-minute meeting with a lawyer. Because the platform provides a head start, both the lawyer and consumer can make better use of the 30-minute time slot.

More help for consumers may be on the way – there is a bumper crop of tech startups jostling to automate various types of legal work. So while our research-shortcut machine hasn’t been built, powerful tools like it may not be far off.

And the lawyers themselves? Like factory and textile workers armed with new power tools, they may be expected to do more work in the time they have. But it should be less of a grind. It might even free them up to meet with clients.The Conversation

Republished with permission under license from The Conversation.