Murder accused James Watson is scheduled to go on trial in January.

It’s the first known case of artificial intelligence being used in a trial at the venerable Old Bailey, the U.K.’s top criminal court.

Defense lawyers for James Watson are using artificial intelligence to analyze the over 10,000 documents connected with the trial. Watson is charged with murdering Rikki Neave, a six-year-old schoolboy in November 1994. (Evening Standard)

In 1996, the boy’s mother was initially accused of the murder but then convicted of child neglect and imprisoned. The investigation into the case was reopened in 2015 and Watson was charged with murder. He claims innocence.

Old Bailey: Watson’s legal team is using AI

The defense lawyers for James Watson are using AI technology created by Luminance, a company based in London and Cambridge.

AI is said to have saved them time in the examination of the evidence and their search for clues that might have escaped the attention of human inspectors.

“We have been served thousands of pages of evidence and material that we have to digest in a limited number of days,” said Sally Hobson, Watson’s lead defense barrister from The 36 Group chambers in London, to the Evening Standard. “The court digital case system has massive limitations: we’re not allowed to put any unused material on there, it can’t read handwritten documents and it will only throw up the exact things that you search for.”

“The AI learns what to search for, reads and understands, and can surface in hours what would take months to find manually. The accuracy it provides is also a saving for the taxpayer.”

Charlotte Golunski, a senior executive at Luminance, said the technology involved a “combination of unsupervised and supervised machine learning, natural language processing and pattern recognition techniques.”

More benefits for the legal system

According to Hobson, the use of AI could also help clear the backlog of court trials caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

AI could also help in criminal investigations because of the increasingly large volume of digital data that could be found on phones and other electronic devices.

The benefits are speed, increased efficiency, higher accuracy compared to humans, and cost savings.

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