Nilay Patel

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Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Neil I. Patel, Editor-in-Chief at The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today, we're going to talk about the role AI might play in deciding legal disputes, not just doing research and drafting memos, actually deciding who's right and who's wrong and who should pay.

My guest today is Bridget McCormack, the former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now the President and CEO of the American Arbitration Association.

You've probably heard of arbitration before.

It's a form of dispute resolution that allows two parties to resolve conflicts outside of the formal court system using a third neutral party, the arbitrator, to negotiate a settlement.

You may have never found yourself in arbitration, but you've almost certainly signed an arbitration clause in one of the many contracts and terms of service agreements that all of us have to sign all the time.

Arbitration can be much faster, cheaper, and easier than going to court, so it's become a favored way of resolving disputes between businesses.

It's also, as it turns out, how many employers and large corporations defend against lawsuits, because they can sneak an arbitration clause into the agreements for everything from cell phone service to smart washing machine features, or even the signing of your employment contract, which can protect them down the line from class action claims.

Arbitration is everywhere in our legal landscape, and you can see why an organization like the AAA would want to make it faster, cheaper, and more predictable.

So for the past several years, Bridget and her team have been developing an AI-assisted arbitration platform they call the AI Arbitrator.

And the AI Arbitrator is now available for use in very specific cases.

Construction disputes that can be resolved entirely on the basis of written documents.