Nilay Patel

Now you oversee – I think the Arbitration Association is 100 years old.

You oversee a 100-year-old dominant provider of arbitration.

Explain to people what the difference is.

It sounds like as the chief justice, you had a role like advocating for the court system with the legislature, inside the justice system.

Most people never hear about that, never think about that.

What was the split in your time?

How often did you have to spend time just saying, hey, can you pay for the courts versus actually being the chief justice?

I'm curious about that because it feels like the experience you had there really leads to your perspective on how and why AI should enter the legal system.

Yep.

The reason I'm starting here with your previous experience and not your current job is I encounter this on our show and on our site all the time that people think the legal system is deterministically.

Like particularly our audience, the tech audience, thinks the legal system is a computer, right?

You can feed it inputs and it'll API access the law and then you'll get some predictable outputs.

And I'm always trying to convince people that that's not the case.

And just even hearing you talk about the politics of running the legal system underlines for me that the legal system is absolutely not deterministic.

Should it be?

Because you're the first person I could just like straightforwardly ask that question to.

Should the legal system be more predictable and deterministic?

Where do you think the sort of source of uncertainty in the legal system as people experience it today comes from?

Is it just that most people can't afford a lawyer?

Is it that some percentage of judges are just weird old guys?