Today, we’re going to talk about the role AI might play in deciding legal disputes. Not just drafting memos and doing research — actually deciding who’s right and who’s wrong, and who should pay.
My guest today is Bridget McCormack, the former chief justice for the Michigan Supreme Court and now president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association. The AAA has been around for exactly 100 years and is the country’s largest nonprofit arbitrator.
You’ve probably heard of arbitration before. It’s is a form of dispute resolution that allows two parties to resolve conflicts outside the formal court system using a third, neutral party — the arbitrator — to negotiate a settlement.
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You may have never found yourself in arbitration, but you’ve almost certainly signed an arbitration clause, in one of the many contracts and terms-of-service agreements that all of us have to sign all the time. Arbitration can be much faster, cheaper, and easier than going to court, so it’s become a favored way of resolving disputes between businesses. It’s also, as it turns out, how many employers and large corporations defend against lawsuits, because they can sneak an arbitration clause into the agreements for everything from cellphone service to smart washing machine features or even your employment contract, which can protect them down the line from class action claims.
Arbitration is everywhere in our legal landscape, so you can see why an organization like the AAA would want to make it faster, cheaper, and more predictable. For the past several years Bridget and her team have been developing an AI-assisted arbitration platform called the AI Arbitrator, and it’s now available for use in very specific cases — construction disputes that can be resolved entirely on the basis of written documents. As of right now, the AI Arbitrator now has officially one case on its docket.
I’m obviously fascinated at how all of that might work, but you’ll hear Bridget and me really dig in here on what this kind of automation means not just for arbitration, but also the bigger, more fundamental idea of seeking justice, and whether or not our legal system feels fair.
Americans’ trust in the judicial system reached a record low in 2024, and you’ll hear Bridget and me go back and forth on whether a system driven by AI can actually help people trust these systems more simply by making each party feel heard and showing its work, something you often don’t get from a human judge.
At the same time, AI systems are AI systems. They’re new, brittle, and hallucinate facts and dates. It feels like there’s real danger in handing this kind of power to such a new, and unpredictable, technology. So you’ll hear Bridget discuss where she thinks the lines should really be drawn, how she’s trying to head off some of the big concerns around AI, and where she sees this going in the future.
Again, Bridget was the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court; she was in charge of all the judges in her state. You’ll hear her say several times that people are unreliable. By the way, if you want a broader look at all of this, Verge reporter Lauren Feiner actually published a fantastic feature on AI in the legal system last month, and I highly suggest you go read that if you’re interested in learning even more.
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