From here:
I think this raises some interesting questions. To the best of my knowledge, modern expert systems are just a long series of if-then-else clauses, but in the future they may be capable of learning new information and making judgment calls that their authors didn’t tell them to. Who’s liable in the event of a mistake? How will we verify which programs are as knowledgeable as an attorney? And to what extent does the law extend to these programs?
I have read that the use of expert systems used to aid doctors in diagnosing disease have shown better results than doctors on their own. I see no reason to believe that people using expert systems for filling out complex forms where the rules of the forms are known would not have much better results. Tax preparation software is a similar expert system is used by millions of people.
I have many of the same questions about people attorneys.
It tends to be very hard to prove that an attorney made mistakes and get restitution from the attorneys.
How do you verify that an attorney is knowledgeable?
Sounds to me like lawyers and judges are protecting their right to take a chunk of money at as many critical points in a person’s life as possible.
The difference there is you have a licensed professional using the expert system, while the article linked in the OP has a laymen attempting to use the expert system.
The tax programs you mention also have a problem, highlighted in an ad being run by a tax preparing service–how do you ask a question of a computer program? If you get audited, is the program going to assist you?
Very troubling. I don’t see how it’s more than a clerical tool or much different from turbotax. After all, people go to bankruptcy and divorce preparers who have only paralegal training, yet they’re not considered to be practicing law without a license. The hawks on this issue would probably bar non-lawyers from even opening a copy of their state codes, since that would be practicing without a license.
Nope. You can research all the law you want, and even represent yourself in Court. You just can’t do that for someone else without having a license to practice law.
Right, but isn’t the software basically a research tool? It doesn’t purport to “represent” anyone before a court. It gives you the statutes of your jurisdiction, and it does provide advice, after a fashion, but if this advice is to advocate a choice of action that should be obvious anyway, is that really practicing law? For instance, you don’t need a lawyer to tell you that a parking ticket is less serious than a speeding ticket, which is less serious than a DUI arrest, but that your optimal plan would be to avoid all three.
The link in the OP contains this quote, apparrently from the 9th Circuit opinion…
*
The software did, indeed, go far beyond providing clerical services. It determined where (particularly, in which schedule) to place information provided by the debtor, selected exemptions for the debtor and supplied relevant legal citations. Providing such personalized guidance has been held to constitute the practice of law.*
Modern Expert Systems are quite a bit more sophisticated than a simple series of if-then-else clauses. Now-a-days, they involve a lot of paradigms from Aritificial Intelligence and Machine Learning allowing them to expand on logic learned from the Subject Matter Expert who trained it without involving a Knowledge Engineer.
The entire purpose of an Expert System is that a layman, or one with some minimal skill set, should be able to use it. In my opinion, if you have a question it cannot address then either the minimum skill set it assumes is insufficient (or not met), or it was poorly engineered.
Part of the problem with Tax programs is the complexity of the system their modelling (how many thousands of pages is the tax code again?) AND that they are generally poorly designed as a series of “yes-no” questions leading you through some predefined forest of “if-then-else” trees.
I suspect you’re correct. Can one sign away this “right” to allow his unlicensed friend, or an unlicensed piece of software to “represent” him?
Further, this shows a latency in the law with regard to technology. That is, if a system is designed to model the knowledge of certified SMEs, and it does so effectively, how is it not somehow transitively certified or at least capable of being certified?
Not in most cases. Laymen are simply not allowed to practice law. However, in social security disability cases, a person can be represented by a non-lawyer, at least through the administrative appeals. After all administrative appeals are exhausted, if the person wants to appeal to a Court, they’d have to have a lawyer or represent themselves. I think (but do not know for sure) that a similar rule applies to tax matters–some people are represented by accountants/tax preparers rather than lawyers at administrative levels. Of course, if I had to make my living doing tax work, I’d put a bullet through my skull. Oakie is sooo not a tax guy.
The full opinion is available on the Ninth Circuit Website. I’m not a bankruptcy attorney, so I may have some details wrong here, but this is how I see it.
There are actually two issues here. The first – and the thing that really got them in trouble – is that they were found to be a “bankruptcy petition preparer” (BPP), which is regulated under the bankruptcy code. A BPP is limited to filling out the petition form using the information given as instructed by the debtor, and is required to note on the petition it was prepared by a BPP.
BPP’s are a problem because they often advise (and misadvise) debtors, who use them as quasi-attorneys. The bankruptcy rules pretty strictly circumscribe what they may do. However, if a BPP follows the rules, it isn’t engaging in the unathorized practice of law, but just being a BPP.
When the individual debtor was questioned about some of the things on his petition, he said the computer program put it together, but the program left the BPP section blank. The bankruptcy court (affirmed by the bankruptcy appellate panel and the Court of Appeals), along with other bankruptcy courts around the country found that the computer system was acting as an undisclosed BPP, which was a problem under the bankruptcy code.
Looking further into the issue, the Ninth Circuit found that the system went beyond what was permitted for a BPP to do. Specifically, it didn’t just fill out the forms in the way the debtor told it to, but rather it asked questions and helped the debtor to classify different things into different parts of the form. Since this sort of thing would be prohibited by an in person BPP, it was likewise prohibited to an online BPP. The court looked into California law on the unauthorized practice of law, and found that going beyond the bounds of being a BPP this way would be considered unauthorized practice of law.
From this point of view, the decision seems correct.