3 Ways Technology Amplifies Human Judgment in Law – Artificial Lawyer

Litigation functions as one of society’s strongest tools for accountability. The challenge, however, is that evidence of harmful conduct is often scattered and hidden in complex data sets, within website code, in opaque algorithms, and amongst other digital traces.

Modern legal technology, when built and used responsibly, gives litigators a broader perspective. Combined with human expertise and judgment, AI-based technology can scan vast quantities of public information, such as government repositories, social media chatter, academic resources, financial market data, geographic data and public health information for some cases, to reveal patterns that suggest a legal violation.

Darrow, for example, uses such legal intelligence to detect high merit matters in data privacy, consumer protection, and the environmental space, among other areas. Our team connects disparate data points and surfaces signals that indicate harm, passing them on to plaintiffs attorneys who examine those signals and decide whether to bring a case.

Technology widens and refines the net, but human litigators still decide what qualifies as harm and how to act. And while AI can help with solving complex problems, human attorneys are still needed to exercise independent legal judgment that is aligned with social values.

These dynamics become even clearer when we look at how AI is actually being deployed inside firms and legal departments. The most effective uses are those that treat AI and technology as allies, not as substitutes for legal expertise.

Technology should also be placed in the hands of clients, not just attorneys. Richard Susskind, author and authority on the future of law and technology, claims that ‘the future will not be a turbo-charged version of today. Instead, we will see an entirely new era of the AI empowered client.’

In that era, legal capability will be woven into the systems people already use, rather than accessed solely through a traditional retainer. For corporations, this means embedding compliance directly into operational processes. For individuals, it means building accessible tools that help them recognize and enforce their rights, instead of silently absorbing harm and possibly addressing it ex-post.

Human judgment sits at the center of this vision, as well. Systems that put ‘the law in the hands of everyone,’ to use Susskind’s phrase, still need lawyers to decide what those systems should do and where their authority should stop. In practice, that work looks less like word processing and more like product design: defining guardrails, choosing training data, articulating standards of fairness, and determining escalation paths when a problem exceeds what an automated system can safely handle.

The work we do at Darrow is an early expression of this shift. Rather than waiting for complaints to arrive one filing at a time, Darrow monitors public data for signs of illegal conduct, and lets human litigators decide what rises to the level of a case they’d like to file. The same logic can apply inside companies and public bodies. AI can watch for patterns that signal risk while lawyers define what counts as intolerable risk and design the interventions that follow. Law is still applied through human judgment, but it is present in more places and at earlier stages of harm.

The opportunity for tomorrow’s lawyers is to help build and govern the systems that will deliver legal capability at scale. That work calls for exactly the qualities that current AI cannot supply, including ethical reasoning, empathy for affected communities, and a clear sense of how legal norms should guide real world behavior. If those values guide the design of AI-enabled services, the result for attorneys is an enhanced role that uses technology to extend the reach of sound legal judgment to far more people than the traditional system has ever been able to serve.