CBA Record Sept-Oct 2019

CLASSIFIED ADS Retiring estate planner/probate attorney selling thirty year practice and office condo in Arlington, Texas. Convenient to interstate and airport. Fully furnished turnkey operation. Seller able to assist buyer. Contact: retiringLLM@outlook.com. CLASSIFIED AD RATES The rates for classified ads are $2.50 per word for CBA members and $3.50 per word for nonmembers. Checks payable to The Chicago Bar Association must accompany all ads. Mail to: Classified Ads, c/o CBA Record, 321 South Plymouth Court, Chicago, IL 60604-3997. Not surprisingly, the current Rules are silent on this issue. However, supervisory lawyers are already responsible under Rules 5.1 and 5.3 for overseeing the actions of lawyer and non-lawyer assis- tants. The Bar should consider amending the Rules to make lawyers ultimately responsible for the ethical conduct of the AI they use in their practice. The oversight could include using additional layers of intelligent programs to monitor the outcomes generated by the AI and make the necessary adjustments to the programs to assure that the AI complies with the Rules. In the words of Alice – “curiouser and curiouser.” Landex Research, Inc. PROBATE RESEARCH MISSING/UNKNOWN HEIRS LOCATED NO EXPENSE TO ESTATE Domestic & International Services for: Courts, Lawyers, Trust Officers, Administrators, Executors 1345 Wiley Road, Suite 121 Schaumburg, Illinois 60173 Phone: 847-519-3600/800-844-6778 Fax: 800-946-6990 www.landexresearch.com FOR SALE

LEGAL ETHICS

BY JOHN LEVIN More onArtificial Intelligence: Lawyers’ Responsibility for the Ethical Conduct of the AI Used in Their Practice T his column in the April/May 2019 issue of the CBA Record discussed determining the responsibility for

address the issue by thinking that we, as lawyers, will monitor the AI and intervene if problems arise. However, for someone in the business of writing code, they would address the problem by writing more code to monitor and repair the AI. As an example, the earlier column referred to the case in which a commer- cially developed program was intended to help judges predict whether a criminal defendant would re-offend. It was discov- ered that the program was biased against blacks and had to be discarded. However, what if ‒ prior to the program being intro- duced ‒ a supervisory program had been written to monitor the AI to assure that it was non-discriminatory. In that case, the system would self-adjust, resulting in satisfactory outcomes. Note, however, that the supervisory program would take the place of the supervisory lawyer (presumably human). The human lawyer – the person subject to the Rules of Professional Conduct – would now be one step removed from overseeing the AI. It does not take too much imagination to continue this process until the human lawyer’s job is reduced to directing the programmer to ensure that the AI supervi- sory program causes the AI to comply with the Rules. In fact, we can foresee a time in which there will be programmers who specialize in writing AI for lawyers and who will be knowledgeable of the requirements of the Rules.

overseeing the ethical behavior of artificial intelligence used in providing legal services. The conclusion was that, by analogy to the current Rules of Professional Conduct, the AI could be treated in two ways: (1) like a machine that you turned off or threw away if it did not work properly, or (2) like an associate who had to be monitored and coached if they made a mistake. The most likely outcome would be that lawyers would have to monitor the AI and tweak it when it made an error. It was, I thought, an interesting intel- lectual exercise addressing a hypothetical problem. I also approached it from a law- yer’s professional point of view. Shortly after the column was published, I went on vacation. One of our fellow trav- ellers happened to write programs applying AI. I showed him a copy of the column and we had an interesting discussion on the subject, during which I learned that (a) the problem is more immediate than we might think, and (b) there is more than one way to analyze the problem. By the latter, I mean that we, as lawyers, John Levin is the retired Assis- tant General Counsel of GATX Corporation and a member of the CBARecord Editorial Board.

42 September/October 2019