Eric Hobsbawm (1995, page 24) stated that the most impressive characteristic of the end of the 20th century was the tension between an increasingly accelerated process of globalisation and the joint inability of public institutions and the collective behaviour of human beings to accommodate themselves to it.
Making the necessary adaptations, it is possible to draw a parallel with the reality experienced nowadays by the legal community, insofar as the main characteristic of this first quarter of the 21st century is perhaps a tension between an increasingly accelerated automation process and transformation of Law and a certain inability of public institutions and private actors to understand this process.
The operators of Law (e.g., lawyers, prosecutors and judges) have not yet been able to understand how deep and extensive the transformations caused in the coming decades from the use of technology in the legal field will be. In the area of intellectual property, for example, the ownership of rights to creations developed by machines is already being discussed.1
Alan Turing himself (1950, page 433) pointed out in his Computing Machinery and Intelligence that “we can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”. Indeed, it is a difficult task to predict the impacts of technology on Law.
In this scenario of uncertainties, the objective of this work is to ascertain if the transformations in the scope of the court proceedings in the short term depend on complex software that uses artificial intelligence.
At an opportune time, the Centre for Teaching and Research in Innovation (CEPI) of the São Paulo Law School at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV DIREITO SP), carried out the research “Technology, Professions and Legal Education”, with the support of the Getulio Vargas Foundation and Google Brasil, with the objective of providing elements to answer two central questions: (i) To what extent are legal professionals prepared for their activity to be performed based on technology? and (ii) How can these professionals prepare for legal professions based on technology?
1. In 2018, the European Patent Office (EPO) rejected an application to include the DABUS machine as the owner of a patent application, since it held that machines and artificial intelligence systems cannot exercise certain personality rights, including that of the owner of a patent. Recently, in China, the Shenzhen Nanshan District Court of Justice, in a legal action for compensation of copyright infringement, ordered the company Shanghai Yingxun Technology to pay damages to Tencent Holdings Ltd. for publishing text written by software (Dreamwriter AI Writing Robot). The Chinese judiciary found that the article met the legal requirements to be categorised as a literary work and that the group behind the software was entitled to compensation.
