[Corrected] JT/DL: A Conversation About the Court Innovation Fund

Let's talk philanthropy

Editor’s note: The version of the newsletter from this morning had a bad link for the Q & A. That’s been fixed.

A Conversation About the Court Innovation Fund

At the end of last year, I had the chance to do a Q+A with Kumar Garg, the President of Renaissance Philanthropy, where I’m the Court Innovation Fellow. In this role, I’m leading the development of a philanthropic fund focused on building the field of court innovation. Below is a selection of the conversation setting the stage of what the Court Innovation Fund is, what it can accomplish, and the AI of it all. Please visit the RenPhil website to read the whole interview.

KG: What sparked the idea of a potential Court Innovation Fund, and why is this moment different for courts and for justice innovation?

JT: For the past three and a half years, I co-designed and co-led the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown Law. This program placed technologists and designers in state and local courts to improve the courts’ responsiveness to public needs. In our final report, we identified multiple systemic chokepoints inhibiting court innovation in the U.S., and by extension people’s ability to access justice, economic mobility, and personal safety. Informed by this on-the-ground experience, we felt a dedicated fund for court innovation was overdue to build the field and overcome these chokepoints.

The timing for this work could not be more acute. The pandemic helped courts understand the cost of having incompatible technical systems, and AI is a wake up call for courts trying to keep up with the rapid state of change. If this one-two punch wasn’t enough, criminal justice reform and federal justice efforts are faltering and federal funding changes risk lost revenue and exploding dockets. Taken together, this moment requires innovative state and local courts to meet the moment and ensure equal justice for all. A focused philanthropic fund can be the catalyst.

KG: Courts are processing millions of cases a year and facing an “AI tsunami.” How do you think these technologies will reshape the front door of American democracy, and what’s at stake if courts don’t get ahead of it?

JT: This isn’t trouble ahead, the tsunami is here now. Late last year, I wrote about a bill in Wisconsin that would replace human court translators with AI software. As I outlined in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state will regret this bill becoming law, because the technology isn’t ready for high-stakes venues like the courts. This is for two reasons. First, most languages are “low-resource” meaning there isn’t a lot of content online in a language like Hmong, Wisconsin’s third most spoken language, which limits the ability to train an AI system to make accurate translations. Second, even a high-resource language like Spanish, which has lots of online content to train AI on, mistranslates legal terms. “Due date” becomes “date to give birth”, and the pronoun “su” (either “your”, “his”, “her”, or “their”) can be mistranslated, sowing confusion over property ownership or legal responsibility. These are not harmless errors, and if legislators in Wisconsin have their way the courts will have to figure out how to get to the facts of the case without a trustworthy translation.

This is just one example of the tsunami that’s already here. In other instances, court watchers are seeing an uptick of debt cases in state courts, which they believe is aided by AI. It’s already well documented that debt claims are often low quality and depend on the defendant not showing up to court to win. AI has the potential to supercharge this predatory practice. Courts are reacting by building automated AI review tools to ensure that debt claims are credible before ruling. While this is a welcome innovation, we lack the tools, like benchmarks, to know if these review tools are accurate or contain biases.

These two examples illustrate what is at stake for courts getting this moment right. Courts provide a process for fact finding and getting at the truth of a legal matter. To adopt AI translation services too early or to rely on unvalidated software to determine case outcomes risks the public’s trust. With nearly 70 million cases a year, courts are one of the most common touch points for the public and our government, getting it wrong there undercuts trust in our entire democratic system.

KG: Who needs to be at the decision-making table for responsible court modernization, particularly around AI governance and standards?

JT: Courts are how the public experience the law. This makes courts a critical service provider in need of public feedback to improve their services. But the public alone are insufficient by themselves. A goal of the Court Innovation Fund is to grow the coalition of people supporting court innovation. Obviously, we need judges, court administrators, IT staff, and other public servants involved in defining the needs and challenges of their demanding work. But we should also be thinking more broadly: there are unexplored issues impacting court modernization, including the economics of reform, the consumer harms created by private vendors, and how the increasing digitization of courts is creating cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Yet, we don’t see economists, consumer protection attorneys, or cyber experts coming to aid the courts.

As much as this potential Fund will organize the buyers and end users of court technology, we also need to incentivize on-ramps to other professions to expand the universe of potential solutions needed by the courts. This approach increases the internal capacity of courts to vet, develop, and deploy responsible, user-centered projects while growing the coalition of professionals in this space. That within itself would be an incredible innovation.

To read the entire interview, including what success of this fund looks like, please visit the RenPhil website.

News

Alaska Courts built an AI chatbot—it didn’t go smoothly. (NBC) (h/t Brandon Sharp)

Axon tests face recognition on police body-worn cameras. (EFF)

AI police report writing software hallucinated someone turning into a frog. (Fox)

An interim evaluation of Utah’s Legal Regulatory Sandbox. (IAALS) (h/t Natalie Knowlton)

Building trust in AI through justice. (NYU)

Could stronger wage garnishment protections mean fewer debt collection lawsuits? (January Advisors)

Canada launches its AI register. (Teresa Scassa)

Events

The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)

Colorado Law is hosting a conference on asymmetries in communication tech, Feb. 1-2. (UCB)

Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)

RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)

Jobs & Opportunities

[New] The A2J Network is accepting submissions for its conference. (A2JN)

The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)

Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)

The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)

Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)

The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)

The Kansas Courts need someone to run their language access program. (KC)

Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)

The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)

The Mozilla Foundation is accepting nominations for fellows. (MF)

[New] Oregon Law Help needs a content creator. (OSB)

The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is accepting paper submissions. (PLSC)

The Recoding America Fund has three open roles. (RAF)

Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big If True Science Accelerator is accepting applicants. (RP)

Tech Policy Press needs an assistant editor. (TPP)

Wired needs a senior politics reporter. (W)

Yale ISP is accepting resident fellow applications through the end of the year. (ISP)