Judgments Issued Ex Machina? Are AI-made Judicial Decisions The Future?

Digitalisation is invading all areas of our lives, including the judiciary. It is impossible to imagine everyday legal life without electronic legal transactions, the electronically managed land and company registers, the edict file or the possibility of submitting briefs to courts in electronic form.

In the future, general access to information and electronic communication will be enhanced still further. To establish digital assistance, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) will increase. AI is considered the key technology of the future and thus opens new doors and questions.

The potential use cases of AI in the Austrian judiciary are currently focused on supporting judges, for example via AI-automated factual legal research or the automatic creation of minutes during hearings using speech recognition. In addition, to optimise internal court workflows, AI could be used to recognise documents and extract metadata as well as to identify