The legal sector is not immune to the impact of AI. An American lawyer and legal blogger believes that Claude AI can adjudicate complex legal cases and, in theory, can also serve as a Supreme Court judge.
Adam Yunikowski, an award-winning attorney who was named to Lawdragon’s list of “500 Outstanding Litigators in America” for 2024, made this bold statement in his article Legal Bulletin on Substack.
“Claude is fully capable of serving as a Supreme Court judge at the present time. When used as a law clerk, Claude is as insightful and accurate as human clerks, while surpassing humans in efficiency.
He arrived at this conclusion by downloading the summaries in every substantive Supreme Court case decided so far this term, then entering them into Claude 3 Opus before asking some follow-up questions.
This AI tool is an offering from Anthropic which has released Claude Model 3 Family in March. At that time, this had exceeded previous typical standards. Now, though, the company has raised itself further Launch of Cloud 3.5 Sonnet Which was released today (Friday, June 21).
How did the legal expert evaluate Claude A.I.’s abilities in law?
The AI tool was first asked to adjudicate the cases and the responses showed that they were decided correctly and consistently.
“When she gets the case wrong — that is, decides it in a different way than the Supreme Court decided it — her action is always reasonable.”
Of the 37 substantive cases analyzed by Amnesty International, it was found that it decided 27 of them in the same way as the Supreme Court. Yunikowski says he was often “more convinced.” Claude’s analysis“The other ten I made a mistake.
After running the tool further and asking it to adjudicate the matter, the lawyer found that Claude was “clearly capable of adjudicating complex cases.”
It even goes so far as to mark the chatbot assistant’s answers as “at or above the level of a human Supreme Court clerk.”
“Not only is Claude able to make reasonable recommendations and formulate judicial opinions, but Claude effortlessly does things like create new legal standards and detect systematic errors in expert testimony.”
“Claude makes mistakes sometimes, but humans make mistakes too,” Yunikowski says.
Featured Image: via Ideogram