AI feature at legal website can simplify complex Canadian cases for Sask. public

Need help understanding a complex legal decision? Artificial intelligence is coming to the rescue. 

For more than two decades, the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII)  a non-profit organization created and funded by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, has gathered and published legal decisions from across the country.

Users searching Saskatchewan decisions can now find a sidebar that provides a summary of the case that includes the facts, procedural history, submissions, legal issues and outcome. The AI feature will now be able to access decisions published in other provinces.

"We can create summaries of cases, short summaries of a few sentences describing the case. We can create long summaries, saving time to the user," said Ivan Mokanov, president of Lexum, the Montreal tech company that provides the service to CanLII.

One of the issues with AI is verifying that the output is accurate.

Mokanov says what makes the CanLII feature so strong is that it's not based on a general knowledge search. Rather, the program is evaluating a specific document.

"Those technologies are best for reading, writing and summarizing. They're exceptionally good … and they have superior skills [to] most humans, and they're very fast," he said.

'We have millions and millions of cases. We have hundreds of thousands of pieces of legislation and regulations. We have secondary sources.

"So, assuming that we have a strong search engine able to retrieve the accurate information in the database, then we can just throw out the [AI] on it and say, well, 'Can you save me some time and tell me what this case is about?'"

The full text of the decision is always published alongside the AI summary so they can be compared, he says.

Devan Mescall, a professor at the Edwards school of business at the University of Saskatchewan, says one of the main advantages of that feature is that it makes summaries of legal decisions accessible to the general public.

However, he also flags accuracy of the data as a potential issue.

"It can give you a really great starting point, but you need a really careful eye to review it, and you need that expertise background to be able to identify when AI is accurate and when it starts taking us down a different path," he said.

"Whenever we look at AI, and this is where my research is, it's that interaction between human and machine. And so as long as the human realizes what they're getting and what the limitations of that are, it can have great potential."

Mescall says another potential pitfall is that AI removes training opportunities, a important component for a young lawyer.

"People can't just jump from being a university graduate to a partner," Mescall said. "They need to learn on these basic tasks, and so AI replacing these tasks, it interrupts that sort of the learning."