Robot Lawyers Set for Trial Against Humans

Next year the Buys legal firm will find out just how popular or unpopular its lawyers actually are, when it introduces robotic rivals to its human staff. The company is developing three robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, to see if artificial intelligence can be as successful as the real thing. The robots will provide online legal opinions and advice to its customers early next year, says Reinhardt Buys. … According to AI Expert Systems at the University of Texas, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will let computers autonomously reason with the law to draw legal conclusions. The head of that team, Selmer Bringsjort, says: ‘Our intuition is that people won’t mind in the least if their lawyers are empowered by artificial colleagues — quite the contrary, if they are the beneficiaries of quicker turnaround time, lower legal fees and higher quality work