ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE LEGAL PROFESSION BETWEEN COOPERATION, COMPETITION AND CONFRONTATION
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE LEGAL PROFESSION BETWEEN COOPERATION, COMPETITION AND CONFRONTATION

Summary/Abstract: Humanity has stepped into a new era, exciting, fascinating and terrifying. One could say revolutionary. Until now, man has thought about artificial intelligence, and now artificial intelligence has started to reason about man. It even tries to get into his psyche and encode his emotions. It has been recognizing people by their appearance, voice and way of speaking for a long time. It monitors them electronically, knows their intimacy, preferences, aspirations and interests. It penetrated, faster than anyone expected and deeper than could be imagined, into all spheres of public and private life, from the media, through medicine, education, finance, energy, production and insurance, to traffic, sports and ecology. Of course, it could miss the legal profession either: the legal profession, the judiciary, the state administration and the legislature. AI has begun to transform that area as well, encroaching on all the tasks immanent in this activity - research, counseling, writing documents, representation, processing, adjudication and so on. Faced with artificial intelligence, the legal profession is faced with a major challenge. The dilemma is to what extent and how to use the tools of artificial intelligence, without jeopardizing the basic rights of people and parties to the proceedings, how to avoid that justice and ethics do not succumb to the speed of work and savings that these tools bring, and finally, whether society in general should and may delegate the function of a judge to a creation that exists only in cyberspace (for now) and cannot be held accountable and subject to criminal law. The application of artificial intelligence tools will have both positive and negative effects on the legal profession. There will be less work for people and more for machines. The interests and needs of the participants themselves in all kinds of legal traffic will intertwine, supplement, but in some areas they will differ when it comes to the attitude towards the engagement of artificial intelligence systems. This relation will range from cooperation, through competition, to confrontation. In order to clarify some of the above-mentioned dilemmas, in this paper we investigated the following questions: (a) what are the basic difficulties in defining artificial intelligence, (b) is artificial intelligence capable of obtaining a law degree and passing the first court exam, (c) which AI tools have already found application in the legal profession; (d) can AI be a legal representative of a party (barrister), (e) what effects will the first court judgment written by the “hand” of the ChatGPT-4 system in Colombia have and other important issues of importance for the application of artificial intelligence in the legal industry and the judiciary as a whole. By studying extensive foreign literature and practice in a number of countries, we came to the belief that artificial intelligence tools will continue to play a significant role in jobs such as legal analysis, researching laws and regulations, finding documents and arguments, predicting the possible outcome of a dispute or the behavior of suspects before, during and after the court process. Such application of these tools will lead to a reduction in litigation costs, to a faster and more cost-effective resolution of disputes and to the facilitation of work in the legal profession. That is why many law offices, lawyers and numerous employees in the judiciary will be interested in obtaining the most modern and effective artificial intelligence tools. In doing so, they will have to take care that efficiency and speed do not suppress justice. As for the engagement of artificial intelligence in court proceedings, it is most likely that it will mainly be used to perform less complex tasks and resolve disputes of lesser value, disputes related to private contracts and cases resolved by tribunals (administrative and labor disputes, etc.). It is unlikely, at least in Western countries, that these tools will have any significant role in the work of the highest judicial instances, such as the Supreme Court, the High Court or the Constitutional Court. There the right to make decisions will remain with the individual judge and the judicial panel. It is not yet possible to assess with certainty whether one day artificial intelligence will acquire the status of a subject of law and in what form, as well as whether futuristic announcements about the potential symbiosis of man and artificial intelligence will one day lead to artificial intelligence wearing a judge’s robe. In conclusion, the authors reinforece the thesis that despite the differences and ambiguities surrounding the legal regulation of artificial intelligence, its spread and penetration into the judiciary are unstoppable. But this whole relationship must be strictly regulated and predictable, subject to laws, imbued with ethics and intended for the benefit of humanity. The more we hesitate on that front, the more severe the consequences will be, because the judiciary is one of the foundations of any social order and a mirror of its democratic development.

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