Paul Gowder, Professional Incompetence and the Use of Machine Learning in Law

Lawyers, like so many other professionals, have a painful relationship with Microsoft Word, often spending hours on end troubleshooting. New machine learning technologies make bold claims, such as selling services that can tell you a judge’s disposition. Tensions arise between a general duty of competence in using the tools of one’s profession on one hand, and market actors offering “lawyer argumentation”, on the other. Is it incompetent, in an ethical sense, to not use these emerging technologies? Paul Gowder University of Iowa Law Legal Ethics in the Age of Law & Tech, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, March 24, 2017