Application of artificial intelligence to improve efficiency in the judiciary

Abstract

Artificial intelligence, a burgeoning force across various sectors, has found its niche in legal proceedings as well. Despite the abundance of published court decisions, the manual scrutiny required for referencing past cases often prolongs the decision-making process in court. To streamline this cumbersome task, this study aims to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence, specifically through Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. By employing techniques such as keyword information retrieval and extractive text summarization, the objective is to facilitate the jury's access to pertinent court decisions on Kenya Law.org. This study evaluates the performance of the BERT model in a legal context, particularly focusing on its ability to classify court cases accurately. The BERT model achieved an accuracy of 66.67%, meaning it correctly predicted the outcome of approximately two out of every three cases. It demonstrated a precision of 66.67%, indicating that two-thirds of the cases predicted as "Convicted" were indeed correct. Notably, the model achieved a perfect recall of 100%, signifying that it identified all actual "Convicted" cases without missing any. Despite the lower precision, the F1 score of 80% reflects a balanced performance, emphasizing the model's strength in detecting all relevant positive cases while maintaining reasonable precision. These results suggest that BERT is an efficient tool for legal case classification, particularly in contexts where ensuring that no positive case is missed is more critical than minimizing false positives. This makes BERT a promising model for supporting legal decision-making and analysis in courts. Given the substantial backlog of cases inundating Kenyan courts, compounded by the intricate nature of these legal matters, our research has underscored the potential for AI to complement human capabilities. These technologies offer a promising avenue for automating various legal processes, thereby streamlining judicial operations.