A jury of one’s peers is a cornerstone of American jurisprudence. Now, there may be an invisible hand in that jury box as AI helps lawyers pick panels who will decide guilt or innocence or liability in a civil case.
Picking a jury used to be considered as much art as science. Attorneys, prosecutors used voir dire — meaning “to speak the truth” — to choose citizens who would sit in judgment. It was a very analog process.
Now Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT can assist attorneys weed through the answers collected from such questions to jurors, “Have you ever been a victim of a crime?” or “Have you had positive or negative experiences with police?”
“We basically outsource the juggling to AI,” said West Palm Beach Attorney Bobby Gonzalez. “I am very careful but I think we are at a point where it is, I believe, malpractice to not use AI for the benefit of your client.”
AI jury selection utilized in a unique Florida free speech case
The intersection between AI and the law is ripe presently. The Florida Supreme Court last month issued an opinion to rein in the use of AI in court pleadings as it tends to invent facts and cases. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in his 2023 year end report, said while AI has “great potential,” it also “risks invading privacy interests and dehumanizing the law.”
The use of AI, Roberts concluded, “requires caution and humility.”
Gonzalez was one of the attorneys who represented a Palm Beach County fire battalion chief accused of stalking her neighbor for cursing her out and playing AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” after her pet cats went missing in an only-in-Florida kind of case first reported by USA Today Network-Florida. Tracey F. Adams, who faced up to a year in jail, ended up acquitted on free speech grounds.
The other side of the First Amendment defense was how her attorneys — Gonzalez and Valentin Rodriguez — utilized AI to help them pick the jury that would acquit Adams in about 30 minutes.
The attorneys fed their notes on each prospective juror — jobs, education, attitudes, pet ownership, views on free speech and more. The AI tool then synthesized the information into profiles and suggested follow-up questions to each panelist. It even predicted who would become the foreperson.
Gonzalez said he used a mix of ChatGPT and Claude. When it came to the final decision, AI told the defense attorneys the probabilities of success.
“So it’s constantly shuffling these people around, and the percentages are going up and down, depending on who you have in the actual jury,” Gonzalez said.
Even with the AI advantage, there was still only a 57% of success in the unusual case.
Rodriguez, the co-counsel, said while the human brain can shuffle jury data obtained in voir dire, AI can take it a step further.
“You’re stuck in a certain framework as a lawyer and sometimes you don’t really hear what’s going on around you,” he said. “What AI does is basically picks all that noise up and interprets it and creates a theme, telling you things that you didn’t necessarily know.”
Momus Analytics uses its own algorithm, not open AI, to help clients choose juries
Alex Alvarez, a former Miami police detective who became an attorney, spent years perfecting an algorithm to pick juries. His company, Momus Analytics, started out in frustration after losing a simple slip-and-fall case in Key West that by his own analysis should have been a slam dunk.
There had to be a better way to pick a jury, Alvarez thought. “I remember watching attorneys. They would go crazy with all their papers,” he said. “That’s changed.”
Momus became his obsession after becoming a successful litigator against Big Tobacco. Rather than buying a plane, or a boat, Alvarez built Momus. He spent years with focus groups, seeing how juries think.
“What I found out is that lawyers are not that consequential in the outcome of the case. It’s really the jurors who decide, and it’s really about how groups make a decision,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez, obviously promotes his jury-selection software as opposed to what he calls “off-the-shelf” chatbots. Momus uses a sealed database built from years of jury questionnaires. It only searches the algorithm and the information imputed by his software engineers.
By using generative tools like Claude or Gemini, attorneys are feeding data into an ecosystem they don’t control, he said. The AI tools could amplify the biases the legal system is supposed to screen out.
“There’s no guardrails,” Alvarez said.
The American Bar Association has sounded the alarm, as well, issuing a formal ethics opinion a year ago.
Excluding a potential juror because of race, sex, religion, age or socioeconomic status remains prohibited — but a chatbot may incorporate such data points in ranking a juror low without explicitly saying why.
“It’s conceivable that the lawyer could strike jurors for unlawfully discriminatory reasons,” the ABA warned.
John Pacenti is the Government Impact Reporter for The USA TODAY NETWORK-FLORIDA. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday day by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at https://palmbeachpost.com/newsletters.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: AI use in Florida jury selection sparks debate over fairness
Reporting by John Pacenti, USA Today Network-Florida / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By John Pacenti, USA Today Network-Florida | USA TODAY Network
