Human-Automation Interaction in Law: Mapping Legal Decisions, Cognitive Processes, and Automation Levels

Abstract

"Legal technologies not only create new ways for accessing and providing legal services, but also transform the roles of legal practitioners. Major area of the application of legal technologies are courts. Some courts, e.g., in Austria, are already using legal technologies, Germany, Brazil, France, Netherlands, Russia and others are developing legal technologies. Both lawyers and users of legal services expect automated solutions to outperform people with efficiency, objectivity and impartiality. Although perception of various characteristics of legal technologies is crucial to their implementation and use, research on the perceived characteristics of the automated processes in legal contexts have just begun. One of the major obstacles to this research is lack of comprehensive understanding what legal actions could be or already are meaningfully automated, and to what extent. The aim of this study is to map decision making stages, and automation levels, and information processing features of legal activities related to (pre)trial processes. Major legal decisions and judgments related to trial processes are identified during the consultations with legal practitioners (e.g., prosecutor, judge). Next, legal activities were described and arranged according to four-stage decision making process: information acquisition, information analysis, decision selection and decision implementation. A taxonomy of levels of automation (LOA) was customized to fit legal decision making and applied to describe each major legal activity. Lastly, dual-process model of information processing was used to delineate possible roles of intuitive and rational information processing taking place during (pre)trial decision making as they could be related to human-automation interaction. Automation level analysis provides systematic approach to interaction between humans and algorithms, along with some groundwork for the research of legal technology perceived fairness and acceptance. 10 legal activities which apply both to judge’s and prosecutor’s (potentially any other lawyer’s) legal work were discerned. The application of adapted LOA (5 levels) provided some insights into legal decision making as it allows to place existing technology, test the trust in technology threshold, and have more tangible view of automation in legal activities. Moreover, a modified hybrid default-interventionist model is proposed. It brings even more depth into analysis by specifying the role of “legal” and “heuristic” intuitions as well as the part rationalization plays in potential bias sources and formation."