8. What assessment has the Counsel General made of how technology can be used to make better law? OAQ52098

I thank the Member for his question. I have begun to consider how technology could be used in helping us make Welsh law easier to find and understand. I recently met with the National Archives and with a judge of the Supreme Court of British Columbia to discuss law as a form of data and how artificial intelligence could make law more accessible and easier to administer.

Thank you very much. I'm sure the Counsel General is aware of a recent competition that took place in the US between so-called 'lawbots' and law professors in a lawyering competition. Both the humans and the artificial intelligence were given four hours to read a contract and identify 30 legal terms and issues, including arbitration and confidentiality agreements. What was most impressive was that the professors scored 85 per cent, but the artificial intelligence scored 95 per cent. The professors took 92 minutes to achieve their score, and the lawbots took 26 seconds.

Some countries are ahead of the game in exploring how this innovation can be applied. New Zealand is exploring how new legislation can be written in both text and in code simultaneously to allow these bots in the future to digest and analyse law to be able to give tailored advice instantaneously to people. Has the Counsel General considered how this could be introduced in Wales? 

Well, I thank the Member for his question. He raises a number of very interesting points there. There is a fundamental both challenge and opportunity for the legal services sector across the world in the sorts of things that he describes, both in terms of creating smart contracts, but also, as his question infers, in the ability to research vast amounts of data and law and case law in a way that is robust and reliable. As it happens, the conversations I've had suggest that that's harder to achieve when it comes to researching legislation itself. But one of the things I've been very keen to do, in thinking about how we can make law more accessible to people in Wales in general, is to have in mind that the pace of change in this area is so significant that we run the risk of designing a better technological solution today for the challenges that we had 10 years ago, rather than thinking forward to what the world might look like in 10 years' time. Now, that is an ambitious challenge, and I don't for one second suggest that it is straightforward—it absolutely isn't. 

He mentions New Zealand in his question. One of the discussions I've been having with the National Archives is around how legislatures can legislate in code and in data form, so that where you have, for example, taxation legislation or benefits legislation, the legislature passes code that can be instantaneously turned into forms and made available to the public in that authoritative way. That obviously poses new burdens on any legislature and needs to be thought through very carefully. I have a meeting arranged with Google in the weeks ahead to discuss with them whether they are working with any other partners worldwide on innovation around some of these areas. I think it's important to have as many sources of inspiration from as many different jurisdictions as possible for what we hope to be able to achieve in the long term here in Wales.

Thank you very much, Counsel General.