Legal Profession Considers Finer Points of Artificial Intelligence
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University of Toronto assistant law Prof. Anthony Niblett knows exactly how to teach students, but what about teaching computers?
Members of the ROSS team, from left: Akash Venkat, Jimoh Ovbiagele, Andrew Arruda, and Shuai Wang.
Members of the ROSS team, from left: Akash Venkat, Jimoh Ovbiagele, Andrew Arruda, and Shuai Wang.
“That’s quite different,” said Niblett, who’s part of a U of T team that’s training Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence technology, to use cognitive reasoning to answer questions about tax law.
For now, Niblett and his team are teaching a Watson-based program called Blue J. Legal to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, a question that has important implications for tax law but also in areas like labour, contract, and tort matters.
Blue J. Legal would ask a lawyer some questions about the clients’ work, including their pay structure, where they work, their mobility, the tools they use, and who owns them. It then uses the facts of the case and the thousands of documents available in its system to tell lawyers the likelihood of whether they’re dealing with an employee or a contract worker with evidence to support the answer.
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