Named after Charles Houston, a famous civil rights lawyer, Houston.AI is a series of web-based tools and designed to automate various tasks necessary to deliver justice in the United States.
What?
Houston.AI is a web-based platform designed to help non-profit legal aid agencies more effectively serve those who cannot afford attorneys. Comprised of a series of micro-services leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence and expert systems Houston.AI is designed to perform many of the simple and routine tasks that lawyers do throughout their day to serve clients.
- Legal Issue Spotting
- Entity Extraction
- Document Analysis (using Computer Vision)
- Tonal Analysis
- Expert Systems to Analyze potential defenses or potential remedies
- Attorney Necessity Scaling
- Predictive Analytics (time and outcomes)
- Intelligent Routing of Cases to Agencies or Attorneys (based on Open Referral)
Why?
In our war to provide meaningful access to justice, it is unrealistic to think that the current army of lawyers devoted to this cause could possibly address the overwhelming legal needs of the most vulnerable and underserved among us without a huge infusion of government funding, a highly unlikely scenario in today’s climate. As such, we must significantly change our strategy on the frontlines to exploit advances in technology.
Simply put: for many of the necessary but routine tasks that lawyers do every day, humans are too slow and too few compared to autonomous machines.
Achieving success on the (asymmetrical) battlefield requires careful coordination between generals (human lawyers) and a cavalry of autonomous foot soldiers (high-speed artificial intelligence applications, leveraging continuously advancing algorithms). In this sense, machine learning as envisioned by this project, is analogous to West Point, preparing and training Justice Bots to help individuals overcome access issues that so pervade the American judicial system.
In the end, these on-demand intelligent resources will allow lawyers to practice at the top of their license (i.e., in their highest and best roles as counselors and advocates) in a far more efficient and effective way, all the while empowering those in need through increased access and equipping them to make better choices, which is to everyone’s benefit.