AI in our Justice System

https://justice.org.uk/ai-in-our-justice-system/

AI in our Justice System 

This report proposes the first rights-based framework to guide AI use across the UK justice system, to help us harness AI’s power while guarding against its risks. 

The justice system plays a vital role in peoples’ lives and our democracy – it determines who cares for children, how crimes are punished, how financial and workplace disputes are solved, and much more. Yet it is beset by crises: court delays run to years, many people with legal problems cannot access necessary legal advice, and prisons are overcrowded.  

The Government intends to use AI to ‘revolutionise’ public services, and AI is already shaping the justice system through police surveillance, legal research, and advice bots, for example.  

Yet AI is not a cure-all, and it carries big risks. Cases like the Post Office Horizon scandal and the Dutch child benefits scandal (where thousands were falsely accused of fraud due to a discriminatory algorithm) show the serious harms technology can enable. The UK justice system also has more data gaps than any other public service, creating extra challenges for responsible AI use. […]

3. Translation technology: Literacy in the language used by the courts is essential,

but for some individuals this is a real barrier. Automated translation technology can assist those who have a different first language to both access and more effectively participate in the process. In business-to-business settings the ability to take documents in one language and have them translated seamlessly has clear advantages in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

Click here to read the full report 

PQ: 30 January 2025

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2025-01-23.26191.h

Asylum: Interviews

Home Office written question – answered at on 30 January 2025.

Rupert Lowe Reform UK, Great Yarmouth

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the cost to the public purse has been of interpretation for asylum interviews in each of the last five years.

Angela Eagle The Minister of State, Home Department

Cost information on Asylum-specific and interpretation costs is not readily available from our financial systems and could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

Are we ready for AI translators in the legal industry?

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and-opinion/are-we-ready-for-ai-translators-in-the-legal-industry/5122114.article

23 January 2025 by Rowena Rix

Are we ready for AI translators in the legal industry?

Interpreters bring an incredible skill to the legal profession. They perform many roles, from precisely translating documents for certification to simultaneously translating phone calls, conference presentations and court proceedings.

In courtroom settings, the ability of speech-to-speech interpreters to impartially and accurately express both counsel's questions and witness responses is both an essential and an immense responsibility.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) powered audio transcription and translation tools are beginning to be introduced into the legal industry, as an alternative to human interpreters.

The incentives for using this type of technology in law largely centre on productivity gains. AI translators remove the often time-consuming need to find, vet and brief interpreters.

Immediate translation at the push of a button allows lawyers to advise clients in real time – which is especially valuable in time-pressured situations, such as injunctive proceedings.

And, of course, while good quality legal translation tools and LLM-based products are not cheap, in the long-run they are likely to be more cost-effective than human interpreters, especially for long-running cases.

There are also wider ethical benefits, such as improving access to justice for people who find themselves involved in legal proceedings in jurisdictions where they do not speak the language, and cannot find or afford an interpreter.

What are the concerns?

Despite its many apparent advantages, to date, there has been some nervousness about introducing AI translation tools into legal proceedings.

Clients, witnesses and even lawyers themselves are not always fully comfortable with machines being part of sensitive conversations.

Lawyer-client relationships are built on trust, and historically the exchange of person-to-person legally privileged information has been highly secure and reliable, even when this information is transferred through the medium of a human interpreter. Precision and accuracy of language is also central to legal process.

Putting aside the fear of change that often dogs attempts to modernise the legal profession, this anxiety about AI translation is partly due to justifiable confidentiality concerns about how recorded information will be safely stored and used, as well as questions about liability for mistakes or the leakage of sensitive data. […]