Nilay Patel

We'll be right back.

Hi, everyone.

This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlak, the Veritas publisher, and L'Oreal Group's Global Vice President of Tech and Open Innovation.

I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

We're back with Bridget McCormick, the head of the American Arbitration Association.

Before the break, Bridget was explaining the nature of arbitration, how it differs from traditional court here in the United States, and how her experience as the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court shaped her philosophy on judicial outcomes.

Now I want to get into the heart of the matter, which is the ambitious project to bring large language models and agents to dispute resolution, something called the AI arbitrator.

I'm starting with this issue of fairness because I feel like when you automate the systems, all of the things that make things feel fair or unfair get heightened, get magnified in very specific ways.

And I just want to ask one more question here, and then I do want to go into why should we automate some of these systems.

The idea that just getting a hearing and some outcome is substantially more fair, I feel like we could unpack that for another week.

There's a reason these companies want to not be in the formal justice system, right?

They don't want precedent for the awards that they're made to give to the parties that come and sue them.

They certainly don't want it in the public record that any of these things ever happen.

They don't want discovery.

All that stuff you don't have to do in arbitration.

So maybe it's easy to participate in.

but there's still a benefit to them that accrues over the long run.

How do you balance that out?

The one thing I will definitely say here is in my mind, we cover big tech companies.

I'm just thinking about the clauses that everybody has to sign in the terms of service agreements.