Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things – a Legal Scenario

By Adam D.A. Manning LLB, LLM

Artificial Intelligence (AI) already plays a surprisingly large role in our society and economy, from the way mobile phones route calls to financial software predicting or playing the stock market, and will become even more prevalent in the future.  A term used to refer to computer systems that mimic aspects of human intelligence such as taking decision or even learning, AI is here to stay.

Another related, revolutionary advance is the Internet of Things (IoT). Put simply, IoT is interconnecting all sorts of devices, including everyday objects, over the Internet so that they can exchange data.  This can include medical equipment such as pacemakers, beds in hospitals able to detect if someone is lying in them and even smart watches worn to track exercise. It can include devices monitoring infrastructure such as roads, bridges and railway tracks. It is of potentially enormous application and there are estimates of 20 to 30 billion IoT enabled devices by 2020.  One consequence is a huge increase in the amount of data available for access.

In considering the practical implications of these developments, one illustrative scenario could be that unfortunately regular occurrence, the road traffic accident.  Cars are a perfect example of “devices” that could be on the IoT and if so, this might entail a car transmitting constant data about its position, speed, orientation and even whether it has a fault or is damaged and in need of repair.

Imagine also that the roads themselves have sensors embedded in them that can detect similar information about the vehicles travelling on them, such as their position and heading. This might be linked to a CCTV system through fixed position cameras or even drones. Data from the transport infrastructure system might also include information about the conditions of the road, such as whether it is dry or not, and the general prevailing conditions (time of day, bright sunshine, visibility, fog, cloud, wind and so forth).

For the time being, ignore the issue of driverless cars to keep things simpler. Now, on this road of the future, imagine that there has been a nasty accident involving several motor vehicles, in which sadly some of the occupants have been injured.

The data from vehicles and the road network could be transferred to the police force’s computer to determine whether the emergency services were needed to attend at the scene and, if so, in what number. As this is a serious incident, a substantial contingent might be appropriate. As a result, the emergency services might be alerted sooner than any of the humans at the scene or observing might have been able to contact them. 

Once the emergency personnel arrive, their data would be added to the set of information already available from the vehicle and road sensors, including an assessment of the injuries suffered by victims at the scene and more details about the damage to the vehicles, including photo and video imagery. Witness evidence from people at the scene (or later taken at the police station or a victim’s home) would add further data.

The AI system used by the police would then analyse all of this data and consider issues concerning criminal liability. This might involve, in part, the use of an expert system, which takes data and applies decision making processes to it. Expert systems are an established field of AI with a long history and do not represent a radical new advance, apart from perhaps the huge amount of data that a true IoT would provide. 

Whether anyone involved was driving over the speed limit might be a relatively straightforward issue for the system to analyse. The software might also analyse whether any of the drivers were driving in such a way that might be considered dangerous or caused the incident. This analysis might evolve over time as the software begins to recognise features of a situation that to a police officer suggest dangerous driving; true machine learning might be required.

The data set could then be further analysed by the police force’s AI to determine if any of the drivers had breached the criminal law and warranted prosecution as a result. This would involve analysing the witness evidence for weaknesses such as contradictions with the objective data obtained from the vehicles and road sensors. Part of this system would entail natural language comprehension on the part of the AI; that is the system would have to “understand” the text of the witness evidence.

If the police force’s AI determined that the case might warrant prosecution, a recommendation could be made for the case to be forwarded to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for a CPS lawyer to review, possibly with the assistance of the CPS’ AI system. The CPS’s AI could analyse the data relevant to this incident and compare it to its library of similar incidents, reviewing their outcomes and predicting what could happen concerning this particular incident. The conclusion of this analysis would be a recommendation regarding prosecution and the possible offence involved.

With regard to the civil law aspects of the situation, the data would be transferred to the AI system for the insurers for those involved in the incident. The insurer’s AI would analyse all of this data to determine if any of the parties involved had a personal injury or motor vehicle damage claim against any of the others.

This would, as the case progressed, include data from the hospitals, GPs and other medical practitioners involved concerning the nature and extent of the injuries suffered.  At an appropriate point in time, when prognoses were as clear as they could be, the insurers’ AI systems could recommend offers to make to settle the claims and even negotiate settlements based on precedents for the amount of compensation involved.

Data from garages, employers, physiotherapists and others could be included in the claim to ensure full compensation was recovered, including loss of earnings. Insurance companies already use software such as Colossus to value claims; this just takes the process to its ultimate conclusion.

Of course, in reality this system might have regular human supervision to ensure it wasn’t making aberrant decisions, but in principle this could operate quite independently of human intervention. Lawyers, that is human lawyers, might only be involved in very difficult cases where the data, even in this amount, was unclear as to whether there was any issue of liability.

The widespread use of driverless vehicles in the future implies that a lot of the data about the vehicle’s position, speed and heading will be available in any event as it will be needed by the driverless navigation system.  In the event of an incident, the issue of who, if anyone, is prosecuted or liable in a civil sense becomes rather more abstract and it may be that the appropriate tort is one of product liability rather than negligence.

This thought experiment illustrates an example of how an even more data driven digital society might function. It relies on an Internet of Things generating the huge amount of data necessary, the internet as a medium for the exchange of this data and AI systems within our institutions and companies processing it and taking sometimes very serious decisions as a result. 

The new lower RTA portal costs

This article is a discussion of developments in the law as it relates to personal injury claims and in particular how lawyers are paid for dealing with them. Nothing on this blog should be taken as legal advice for anyone pursuing a claim and if you need legal advice you should contact a solicitor. This article concerns costs for typical RTA cases that make up a significant proportion of all the personal injury claims that are pursued.

On 30th April 2013, the new lower costs came into existence for road traffic accidents with a value under £10,000 that are pursued through the RTA portal.  At Stage 1 the fees are now £200 plus VAT and at Stage 2 they are £300 plus VAT for a total of £500 plus VAT. That's right, £500 plus VAT for dealing with a case that could be anywhere up to £10,000 in value.

This change applies to all cases entered onto the RTA portal on or after 30th April 2013 regardless of the date of the actual accident. The potentially retrospective nature of this alteration is of course unfair and has been dubbed the "portal portcullis" by well known personal injury lawyer David Bott as a result.

Prior to this change, the fixed fee for this category was in total £1,200. The lower fee is a reduction of approximately 58% of the amount lawyers charge the defendant (or rather their insurance company) for dealing with a case of this type.  A huge drop.  How would doctors, teachers or accountants respond if the government decreed that the income from a sizeable proportion of their work was going to be cut down in this way?

A lot of these claims are pursued under a Conditional Fee Agreement and so a success fee may also apply. If the CFA was entered into prior to 1st April 2013 a success fee could be claimed from the Defendant.  In an RTA claim that was settled prior to trial, the normal percentage applied was 12.5%. So, on a fee of £1,200 plus VAT the additional amount was £150 plus VAT for a grand total of £1,350 plus VAT.

From 1st April 2013 success fees are no longer claimable from the Defendant.  Instead many lawyers are getting used to the previous practise of charging clients a success fee in accordance with the earlier, original incarnation of the Conditional Fee Agreement.

If the previous model of a 12.5% success fee is used and this is simply based on recoverable costs, under the new lower costs this amounts to £62.50 plus VAT. In total then the new costs here would be £500 plus £62.50 or £562.50 plus of course VAT on top.  This would still be a reduction of 58%.

Some lawyers are taking the approach of charging a 100% success fee (the maximum the rules allow) and basing this not on the fixed recoverable costs in the portal but on the solicitor-client costs calculated in accordance with an hourly chargeable rate.

Personal injury lawyers may need reminding of course that recoverable costs (or as I still like to say inter-partes costs) are not the same as solicitor-client costs, something that to most other civil litigators will be entirely obvious.  The days of guaranteeing the client 100% recoverability have perhaps obscured this for accident lawyers.  Indeed one of the rites of passage when initially advising clients on a piece of civil litigation is to point out that it is likely the total bill for the work done is unlikely to be recoverable and that there will be a shortfall.

The maximum deduction that can be made from compensation under the rules for the success fee is 25% of damages (not including future losses and any deductions for CRU purposes).  A typical RTA case through the portal might be worth £2,000 in damages but let's be optimistic and consider a case worth £3,000. After all, cases where a success fee or ATEI is not recoverable from the Defendant are entitled to a 10% uplift on general damages.

Where damages are £3,000 and assuming there is no element that is future losses or CRU, the maximum success fee chargeable to the client is £750.  This will include VAT and so the profit costs element is £625 plus VAT. Using this example the costs recovered by the lawyer is £500 plus £625 being in total £1,125 plus of course VAT on top.  This assumes of course that the solicitor-client costs incurred in pursuing the claim is at least £625.

This amount of £1,125 is still a 17% reduction of the previous fees on a CFA and requires the client to accept a 25% deduction to their compensation.

Of course, claims will still exit the portal and some will go onto be issued and potentially even go to trial.  Until 31st July 2013 when the new fixed recoverable costs system comes into effect, such cases will be dealt with under the predictive costs regime and, if issued, normally a chargeable hourly basis.  But these figures give an idea of the implications of the new lower portal costs.

In light of the recent government consultation on increasing the small claims personal injury limit to £5,000 its interesting to speculate that the change to the fees and the possible charging of the success fee to clients is part of a broader strategy to move the whole system away from recoverable costs completely.  The ultimate destination would be a contingency fee system where the only fees lawyers recover would be by way of deductions from client's compensation.  Please see my previous article entitled The new portal fees - the warm up to increasing the small claims limit?

Yet the government's announcement about the reduction in fees does not help support this theory.  It says quite specifically that the lower lawyer fees will make no difference to the amount of compensation for genuine claimants.  The whole tenor of this press release bespeaks the government's attitude to personal injury lawyers as a profession.  Helen Grant MP's view is that any decision about an increase in the small claims personal injury limit will not be made until the autumn - a long time to wait for a decision that may have huge implications for lawyers and their clients.