Court AI reaches every corner of justice system

Artificial intelligence has been used in all corners of China’s legal system and has a role in every verdict, according to the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing.

“The smart court SoS (system of systems) now connects to the desk of every working judge across the country,” said Xu Jianfeng, director of the court’s information centre in a report published on Tuesday in Strategic Study of CAE.

The system, powered by machine learning technology, automatically screens court cases for references, recommends laws and regulations, drafts legal documents and alters perceived human errors, if any, in a verdict.

The journal report said AI had cut judges’ average workloads by over a third, and saved citizens 1.7 billion working hours from 2019 to 2021. It also said there had been a saving of more than 300 billion yuan (HK$350 billion) during the same period – equal to about half of total lawyers’ fees in the country last year.

“The wide application of the smart court system has made a significant contribution to the judicial advancement of human civilisation”, Xu said.

When starting six years ago, the system served merely as a database. But in recent years it has been used more in the decisionmaking process.

Judges must now consult AI on every case, and if they reject the recommendation, the system requires a written explanation for records and auditing.

Critics say judges adhere to the AI recommendation to save the trouble of challenging the system, even though it might select less suitable reference material or law for the case.

“It is too early to sell the smart court system as a panacea,” said Sun Yubao, a judge at the People’s Court of Yangzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone in Jiangsu province in a paper published in the journal Legality Vision this month. “We need to reduce the public’s high expectation of artificial intelligence and defend the role of a judge. AI cannot do everything.”

But for the supreme court, AI delivers the rule of law to a great part of China. Before 2016, each local court built and maintained its own information system, and the judges rarely shared their cases with other courts or Beijing.

The national smart court system has forced every local court to convert their documents to a uniform digital format and connect their database to a central “brain” in Beijing.

According to the supreme court report, the AI reads, analyses and learns from nearly 100,000 cases across the nation every day while keeping an eye on the progress of every case for any hints of malpractice or corruption.

The influence of AI extended far beyond the courtroom, Xu’s team said. New information portals gave the smart court system direct access to the huge database maintained by police, prosecutors and some government agencies.

Verdict enforcement has long been an issue for Chinese courts, which have been deemed to be lacking in manpower. The court’s AI addresses it by finding and seizing the property of a convict almost instantly and putting it up for online auction.

Its electronic reach also allows the smart court to work with China’s powerful “social credit system” to ban a person who refuses to pay a debt from using an airline, high speed train, hotel or other social services.

Zhang Linghan, professor of law at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, warned that the rapid rise of AI could create a world where humans were ruled by machines.

AI reform in China aimed to reduce judicial discretion or a judge’s power to make a decision based on individual evaluation, experience or training, she said.

This could improve efficiency and fairness to a certain degree, but “humans will gradually lose free will with an increasing dependency on technology”, she said in the domestic peerreviewed journal Law and Social Development. “We must be alert to the erosion of judicial power by technology companies and capital,” she said.

Meanwhile, an AI prosecutor has started charging suspects with criminal offences in some big cities such as Shanghai, according to the researchers. And Zero Trust, an anti-corruption AI built to monitor government employees’ social connections, has been deployed in some cities, triggering resistance from local officials.