Man vs robot: LF’s legal battle
St Petersburg International Legal Forum has held for the first time a legal battle between a person and a bot Legal Ape that was developed by Megafon. Man 1 : Legal Ape 0.
The representative from the lawyers was Roman Bevzenko who is a partner of Pepeliaev Group. The jury consisted of the Dean of the Faculty of Law at SPbU Sergei Belov, Chairperson of Board of Directors of Pravo.Ru Aleksandr Sarapin, and Director of the Block-chain Laboratory at Deloitte LLC Artem Tolkachev.
As the bot is based on the neural network, it gains knowledge by learning legal norms, legal procedures, correspondence, and books. For two months, the bot was trained as it was an important part of its development.
The case was whether the leaseholder can register the right to own property built on the tenanted land. The dispute included oral argument and questioning. Roman Bevzenko had to “communicate” with the robot by voice recording and messaging. Roman was far ahead of the neural network scoring 60 points more.
“If the judge was a bot, it would use its own criteria. Yet we are humans and it is important that the bot should make sense out of what we talk. How Roam explained was better those the bot provided, — said the Dean of the Faculty of Law. — The bot gave wrong answers. Its oral argument was practically the same what it said at the very beginning. It responded quite actively, but not as actively as Roman did”.
We are fully aware of the time-billing and we have no time to deal with the routine tasks. Now humans shouldn’t interfere with the routine tasks.
Moderator of the battle, Director for Legal Issues in Megafon Sergei Pereverzev
The name of the application is associated with the tasks it performs. “Today, the lawyers partly perform duties that any ape would do: answering silly questions. Our idea is to learn how to create and manage them”, — said Sergei Pereverzev.
St Petersburg International Legal Forum focuses on how the lawyers will have to interact with Artificial Intelligence in the nearest future. The Minister of Justice in the Russian Federation Aleksandr Konovalov opened the plenary session of the International Youth Legal Forum at SPbU and told that so-called paralegal-lawyers who perform routine duties are going to be replaced by the robots in the nearest future. This is what the developers of the Legal Ape also think. “The robot is not instead of the lawyers; rather it is for the lawyers. It will help the lawyers focus on more creative tasks”, — said Sergei Pereverzev.