AI Case Study

"Ignacio Raffa’s app, Prometea, can judge you in 10 seconds. “Hello,” he says into his phone. “Hello, Ignacio, what do you want to do?” the app replies.
“Create a ruling.”
“What’s the case file number?”
“1-5-0-9-9.”
Seconds later, the artificial intelligence software has generated a draft ruling on a public housing case, one that carries the letterhead of the Buenos Aires district attorney’s office and all the proper fonts and jargon, with no lawyers or paralegals involved.

In Argentina, DAs write the decisions and the cases’ presiding judges either reject them and write their own, or simply approve them. Prometea is being used for stuff like taxi license disputes, not murder trials, but it’s a significant automation of the city’s justice system. The Buenos Aires office says its 15 lawyers can now clear what used to be six months’ worth of cases in just six weeks.

Raffa, a local startup founder, and his colleagues created Prometea in partnership with the DA’s office. The agency says the app has helped redirect staffers away from legal scut work and toward more complex cases, and that proofreaders rarely find errors when reviewing the computer-generated files. The app has attracted interest from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, among others. “It can help legal systems around the world,” says Asha Aravindakshan, a Sloan Fellow at MIT who saw a demo of the app this summer. “Everyone has a backlog.”

Prometea (as in Prometheus) is also bilingual. Users searching the app for a case filed in Spanish can provide instructions in English, and the app will translate and search in Spanish.

When a case file enters the DA’s system, Prometea matches it to the most relevant decisions in its database, enabling it to guess how the court will rule in relatively simple cases—teachers complaining that they weren’t compensated for classroom supplies they bought, for example."

"To date, the Buenos Aires prosecutor office estimates that our AI-based solution has automated about 50% of the normal workload, leaving prosecutors free to focus on the actual, true legal work and analysis required to accelerate the processing the backlog of cases to be adjudicated." (ztz.ai)