Lawyer and Judicial Competency in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Requirements for Documenting Datasets and Machine Learning Models

Abstract

Judges and lawyers have the duty of technology competence, which includes competence in artificial intelligence technologies (“AI”). So not only must lawyers advise their clients on new legal, regulatory, ethical, and human rights challenges associated with AI, they increasingly need to evaluate the ethical implications of including AI technology tools in their own legal practice. Similarly, judge competence consists of, among other things, knowledge and skill of technology relevant to service as a judicial officer, which includes AI. After describing how AI implicates ethical issues for lawyers and judges and the requirement for lawyers and judges to have technical competency in the AI tools they use, this article argues for the requirement to use one or both of the following human interpretable AI disclosure forms when lawyers and judges are using AI tools: Dataset Disclosure Form or Model Disclosure Form.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, ethics, Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Model Code of Judicial Conduct