Nilay Patel recently interviewed Bridget McCormack, former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now head of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), about the AAA’s new AI-assisted arbitration platform and the broader role AI might play in legal dispute resolution. It was a rich conversation, touching on the design and mechanics of the AI arbitration system, procedural fairness and perceived trust, and the limits and risks and opportunities of deploying AI in adjudicative contexts.
McCormack raised a number of ways that agentic AI systems can be used in arbitration processes, including:
- case intake and understanding parties’ positions,
- organizing some evidence supplied by parties,
- providing mechanisms for parties to assess whether they even want to bring a case to arbitration,
- establishing less-biased (or more bias evident) decision systems that lend themselves to auditing, and
- more broadly expanding access to arbitration processes by reducing costs and time linked with these activities.
The AAA has worked slowly and carefully in developing their AI-enabled processes, and it will be interesting to see the outcomes of their innovations. Similarly, I’ll be curious to see whether (and if so, how) other adjudication and tribunal bodies look to adopt these technologies in the coming months and years.
Excited Pixels 