AI And Construction Law: An Essential And Inevitable Partnership - Part 2

Wouldn't it be great to have a crystal ball to see into the future and understand the likely outcome of your dispute, before embarking on that costly adjudication or court proceedings?

Whilst this off-the-shelf crystal ball is not yet available in stores for immediate purchase, some exciting developments have taken place in legal tech over the past few years. We are now starting to see the use of new technologies in dispute resolution and indeed new studies and research allow us to glimpse what might be just around the corner.

Part 1 of this series considered AI and construction law in the context of risk and contract management, and looked at a few of the technologies that are available now to assist in this respect. Part 2 now looks at the use of AI in the context of dispute resolution and predicting the outcome of disputes.

AI and Dispute Resolution

It is now commonly accepted that the industry often uses the term "AI" generally to cover discussions around machine learning, automation, pattern recognition within text and the automation of extracting this text. This is known specifically as "applied" artificial intelligence and is well used in applications that require the performance of a specific task and/or an automated, logic-based decision or action.

With regard to machine learning, this is a system or software which "learns" from the data it processes, through the use of algorithms. The software can learn from tags already applied to the documents (supervised learning) or it can categorise/cluster documents itself based on common characteristics (unsupervised learning). A system can also learn from the success of its previous decisions (reinforcement learning). In reinforcement learning there is no correct answer from the outset, but the system learns through trial and error when a user/reviewer says whether it is right or wrong, as it goes along.

"Strong" AI are those processes which are equivalent to human intelligence and have the ability to reason, make decisions and replicate human cognitive functions.

In the context of construction, whilst "strong" AI is perhaps some way off, "applied" AI certainly is here and is in use to some extent already. Machine learning technologies and AI-based data analytics are employed at various stages of construction and energy projects: contract formation, project management, manufacturing and construction and dispute resolution.

Disclosure

In terms of dispute resolution, to date, the disclosure...