YouSaid · the spoken record

Elizabeth T. McCormack

lines on the record: 86
first: 2026-02-12
most recent: 2026-02-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Literally, just before we sat down, Goldman Sachs announced that it was putting AI into more of its accounting functions and other functions at the company. And you can, yeah, you can see the acceleration. I think my prediction is we're going to accelerate into it and then we're going to pump the brakes really hard when we realize these systems are not as predictable as we want them to be. But I will have you back faster than 15 years to see how it's going. I've loved this conversation. Thank you so much for being on Dakota Bridget.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A completely different training, you know, my podcast is on AI in the future of law, and I'm just talking about, and you might know two careers ago, I spent 15 years on a law faculty. So the training model is kind of broken for what lawyers are going to do in, I don't know, again, if it's two, five or ten years. And I don't see anybody moving extremely quickly to figure out what the 2.0 training model is. Now, I want to say I don't think the 1.0 training model was that great. I'm not sure that sitting in the basement looking through a bunch of like boxes of documents really made you an excellent lawyer or strategist or Yeah, lot to do yet.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can either hire a 26 year old who's been drunk for several years. That was me. And they can be whoever they are as a first year associate. You can have a robot do it. And like maybe that's the same. I think that the question that I haven't sort of in response is I think it will happen very fast and then it will slow down because everyone will realize there's not a next generation of people who understand how to control the systems and that investment still needs to be made. And the outcomes of those systems are not as good as we wanted them to be.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if you look at our stack of guests over the past few months, we just had DocuSign on the show. They're like, AI is going to write the documents for you because we have access to your business intelligence with Lexus Nexus on the show. He's like, the lawyers will just start doing the research here and drafting out of these claims. And I don't know. That seems very dangerous to me. But you see this universe of legal work is being automated very quickly because the AI systems are good at words.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human driven, and people businesses in particular, B2B documents only disputes are opting for a slow, expensive human-led process. I'd be very surprised. But that's a really conservative answer to your question. Do you have a better answer? When do you think we're How quickly do you think, I mean, it's going to go with a lot of the rest of the way the technology is going to disrupt our lives, right? It's going to, it's all kind of connected.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a great question. I mean, so there's at least two variables that we're following. One is just how quickly our team, our engineers and the related folks that work on that scrum team can build it out for different case types, right? documents only dispute types and then whether there are some institutions that want to use it for internal dispute resolution we've had some some interest in that That's going to take a while you know that's going to take us a couple of years to build out each you know dispute type by dispute type. So that's slow and then there's the when do people you know when does the worm turn? And you know your guess on that is as good as good as mine. I don't know if it's two years, five years or ten years. I'd be very surprised if in 15 years people are still opting for a slow”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I appreciate the ambition. It's a lot to think. I mean, the idea that I'm able to negotiate the terms of service refrigerator, maybe that is what I think Congress should allow us to do. But that's a different, again, yet again, a different podcast. When you think about the scope of this, the timeline of the investment that you're making, you've got one case in the system now. We're going to see how it goes. You've obviously run some simulations on previous cases, and you think that you've got some studies that say it's going well. How fast does it go from here? What's next? Is it 10 cases? Is it you're on a sales trip? What's the speed?”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have no horse in that race. If Congress were to say tomorrow, like, we don't want B2C cases in arbitration. We'll want them all in courts. I think it would probably be a mistake because I've seen how courts operate and the resources they don't have. Believe me, there are lots of judges who are trying to do really well by all those folks on their dockets. They just don't have the resources or the time. And they have these archaic rules. So I think it probably wouldn't be good for everybody. I certainly have no horse in that race. Like my view is I can create dispute resolution services and processes just to give everybody more options. And I want people to want those options. I don't want people to like be stuck with those options. I want to create something that's so good that you want it. You want to go to LG next time and say, can you please put an American Arbitration Association clause in my contract? Because that's where I want to resolve my dispute.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up and in plain language, tell a person what happened to me, and a person will listen to it and answer it. I mean, I understand that there has been like a pretty successful narrative that this process doesn't work for individuals. And I am sure there are places where it doesn't. But not every arbitration provider and dispute resolution provider is created equal. And some have different missions than others. And that matters, right? So I think, you know, there could be a campaign to say to, I have no idea who I don't know if LG uses us or some other provider to say to LG, like we want you to switch to a provider that actually has due process protocols. That's what we want you to do. Or you could go to Congress and you could tell Congress to amend the FAA to say no B2C.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you would have. That's fair. But, you know, most people and they aren't going to get it right and they are most often never going to make it past go. I mean, look at the high volume dockets in state courts. Just take a look at how many cases on the consumer debt docket, which is, by the way, the modal case in state court right now. Literally, the modal case in state court is a consumer debt case. Go take a look at how many of those are just dismissed because the consumer, not the business, didn't meet some, you know, I don't know, court rule 26.4A that said you had to have a triplicate when you responded to the thing. You're not going to be able to go back to Joe's refrigerator service and say like, hey, that court process wasn't fair because there's no way I'm going to be able to read the Latin and figure out that I have to file and triplicate my thing. So I want to go to arbitration where at least I can just show.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you don't mean I want a different arbitrator. You mean because you can't go to, I mean, if you, if you're buying a refrigerator from Joe refrigerator store on your corner that doesn't have a contract with an arbitration clause and you end up suing in court, you're going to go probably to small claims court. You're going to have not been able to figure out how to file properly and your case will have been dismissed. I'm telling you that's what happens in most cases where people try and file cases in courts. Are you going to be able to go back to Joe?”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The construction case, right? You've got two parties, and presumably they've contracted for the sale of lumber, and they've come to there's an actual like meeting of the mines, and they might have negotiated in. We need arbitration because we've got to move fast. And fine, automate that away. And if you get it wrong, I sign the terms of service LG refrigerator, which does have an arbitration agreement. Yes. And I'm like, that sucked. My refrigerator exploded and the arbitrator ruled against me. The next time I buy a refrigerator, I can't go to LG and say, I want a different arbitrator. And so I don't see where that mechanism comes in for most people because most people are just signing tons and tons of arbitration agreements all the time.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you're asking when you enter into any kind of B2C contract, you're just buying a new refrigerator, you don't really get to scrutinize it and say, I want to, you know, change the last clause. People aren't really entering into arbitration agreements. Arbitration clauses are just part of contracts they're entering into.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you can tell, I'm fascinated. The reason I keep poking at this, you know, our readers at the Verge, like every other consumer in modernity, you just live a life of signing contracts. And like, you don't get to negotiate those contracts, but you literally cannot participate in society without having signed dozens upon dozens of arbitration agreements. And I hear you say we have to get it right. We can't get it wrong. What is the mechanism of getting it wrong and then being forced to change when no one can negotiate the contract that landed them in arbitration in the first place? Do you know what I mean? Like if there's some public accountability that's like the AAA got everything wrong for a year with the AI system, then what? Because I can't go to all of my service providers and say, I don't want to use the AAA anymore. I saw this news report.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Critically important to us that both sides feel in the individual case that they were treated fairly. If it's algorithmic, I mean, if it's, you know, automated to some extent, even in part, that's just as true, but easier to show our work. You know, we did a lot of training, judicial training, and we do a lot of arbitrator training when human arbitrators decide cases to make sure that parties get equal treatment, fair treatment. But you can de-bias the data set a lot easier than you can debias a human. And so when you benchmark and do your audits of your AI arbitration system and you show your work, you can either convince the public that it's treating both people fairly or you won't. For us to show”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super good question. As you know, easier to train a data set than a human. So frankly, and let me step back for a minute, in our consumer cases again, we do not accept cases unless a consumer B2C cases unless a business has cleared their clause with our due process protocols. So we're again in a lucky position there, I guess. But back to the who's in charge, you know, for us, if the consumer feels like the process wasn't fair, that's not going to work. We're just not, you know, we're in the business of actually, you know, giving more options to more parties. And if half of the parties in one kind of dispute type, I should say we mostly do B2B cases, but when we do B2C and they've satisfied our... Do process protocols”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that imbalance seems like where the loss of trust, at least in the consumer side that I cover so much, comes from. How do you make sure, even as a nonprofit, that the party that is paying for and driving the system doesn't make sure the automated system, in particular the automated system, doesn't favor them over time? Because that's a pretty easy outcome to start programming in.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but let me just contrast that to your previous role in the state courts as the chief justice in Michigan. The Michigan Supreme Courts belong to everybody in Michigan, right? No matter who the parties are, they're yours. You're paying taxes. You walk in and maybe they work and maybe they don't. And maybe no one knows who was at the function saying what. But it belongs to you in some way equally. In arbitration, there was recently a case like Disney said to somebody try to sue them in a theme park. You signed the arbitration agreement for Disney+. Like we're going to arbitration. That's pretty one-sided. That form does not belong to both parties equally.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really happy that at the end of the year, I don't have a bunch of owners that are looking for their profits. We have a mission. If we can bring the friction and the cost Dispute resolution services down significantly and therefore offer it to a whole lot more people. We're serving our mission.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this is where I feel very, very lucky that we have a nonprofit mission, and our mission is to expand access to alternative ways of resolving disputes to as many people as possible. But we're like a court, right? We do serve parties, but there's two parties in every case. There's, you know, parties on both sides of every dispute. And we need to make sure both sides, both parties feel satisfied with the dispute resolution process they got. I thought you were going to say as the cost comes down as a result of even sort of AI automation for parts of disputes or full disputes depending on the dispute, it's therefore harder for dispute resolution providers who need to make money to make money on that process that would be a problem. And I can see how it might be. But again, really.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing I haven't think about Threats conversation is who gets access to these systems, who gets to make it feel fair, where does the trust in the agency come from? A pervasive criticism of arbitration, broadly, is, well, it's a service, right? It's fee for service even though the AAA is a nonprofit. There are other, I would say more rapacious providers of arbitration services that do run them as for-profit businesses. You have clients. The clients have to be happy with the outcomes. And that does feel like it changes how people perceive the whole process. As you automate that, right? And you have big clients who are paying for lots and lots of arbitration and they can see that the automated system is either helping them or hurting them. Should that affect how people think about the fairness of the system overall, these are fundamentally your clients and you're building a tool for them.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly when the world turns and we're finally able to manage lots of disputes in different ways, including AI dispute resolution systems. But I feel pretty confident we will get there. I mean, I think I said to you at that time, and I still agree, I mean, for sure in some number of years, we will think it's amazing that we let humans drive cars, right? When my kids started driving, it was the most terrifying time of my life, right? Like not really for them, but like I couldn't believe we were letting them out onto the pub, you know, onto the public roads with all these like innocent people out there driving cars next to them. I think at some point we'll think that was insane that we let people drive cars. And I think we'll also think it was probably crazy that we thought a human being had to oversee the disputes between private parties who want to be able to move through that dispute and be at a better place that inserting a human with”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wife, as it happens, is a divorce lawyer, and I do think an AI agent of her just talking her clients through the decisions that were made a long time ago over and over again would actually be very helpful for her in many ways, because that seems like a lot of her job. I understand what you're saying there. You said this thing to me. You know, you've got one case in the system. Is that borne out? Do you feel that as strongly as you did when we first talked a few months ago?”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disputes we have today and the volume of disputes we have today, and it hasn't been for four decades. You know, it's been a very long time since public dispute resolution systems have been able to address the problems in their local communities. So why wouldn't we have more options so people could choose the right option for them in the right moment? There would be some, there would be some family disputes where parents prefer not to go to court. They want to work things out privately. They can do that now. They can go to mediation and just file a resolution. That to me seems like a good idea to be able to offer people a way to move through a dispute so that they come out on the other side, both better with respect to each other, better with respect to the other people who are impacted by the dispute, and even feel like they were able to manage that with some agency. I don't know.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plan for the disruptions that befall every small business, we'd have a better world. I mean, you know, disputes are not great, right? Like they make a mess of economic relationships. They make a mess of personal relationships. And resolving them, in fact, does lead to, you know, more peace, more stability, more economic growth, if that's your thing. Resolving disputes is good. Right now, we do not have any way to resolve most disputes because our one-to-one bespoke built-in 1776 system is no match for the kind of”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that's a completely fair point. And again, I go back to where I believe disputes should be decided publicly. And I think that that should be true no matter how excellent, I mean, eventually probably the judges should be using some tech to help them make sure they don't make mistakes that will undermine accountability and undermine trust. But not all disputes are created equal, Neil. I mean, we all have lots of disputes that some of which we just think like, well, I don't even have the time or the energy or the resources to get that one resolved. But if we did, if you could really resolve every dispute, if every human being could have a will or a plan for what happens if they become incapacitated or die, if every small business could”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important enough for me to ask. Anyway, that's like that's a system that people understand about humans, right? They have reputations, they have histories, they have experiences. You can Google them. And then sometimes they die, right? And they just go away. You get some new ones. And at least the system replenishes and evolves. An AI system running on a cloud service that you can't see on a data center that you might have hated being put in your community does not feel accountable to you in that way. And maybe it's getting it right more often on whatever metric that someone who is not you has decided is important, but you can't actually hold it accountable. And that to me feels like the biggest gap in all of these automated decision systems that no one wants to account for because the efficiency gain is so high.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that I have a lot of trust in the public justice system. What I know about those guys is that they get old and sometimes they go away. I wish more of them would go away at higher rates, but sometimes they go away. Sometimes they get replaced by newer, different people with different biases, and the system replenishes at some rate that feels like accountability, right? You can ruin that guy's reputation if you would just say his name. And Bridget, I invite you to say his name out loud right here if you would.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I called the guy. I said, Judge, you know, you've made this claim about me on the listserv to every probate cord in the state of Michigan, but I wasn't there. Like I wasn't at that forum. I have an alibi. And you know what his answer was? His answer was yes, you were. What do you do with that? I mean, what do you do with that? He won. I was like, well, I don't know. Okay. I mean, you know, what do you even do with that? So if you think that the human beings who get tired, who get hungry, who, like all of us, come to the table with cognitive biases are getting every single thing right, then you have a lot more trust in the public justice system than I think most people do.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fine. People should criticize me whenever they want. The thing was, I wasn't at that forum. My colleague, Megan Kavanaugh, Megan Kavanaugh, also a white woman with an Irish name was at that forum. And I know Megan, she probably did say those things.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To kick the tires of what we were building to be able to test. How it performs against humans, you know, against the human baseline and the results are excellent. So I'm excited for folks to see that when it's all ready to go. But it's an important question. Again, as opposed to what? You've met humans, right? And you've met humans who are judges. If you think they're getting it right every single time they make a decision, I want to introduce you to some folks. Let me just, this is such a anecdotal stories are kind of useless when we're trying to talk about something important like this, but I was the chief justice of, you know, the Michigan Supreme Court. I've been in that role like three years. And we were working on some reforms in the probate court system. And some of the probate court judges, I guess, didn't like them. And one of those probate court judges from a county not that far from where I live got on his listserv and was like just talking trash about me. He said that I was at a forum and I had said a bunch of stuff and like how outrageous it was.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get so good eventually that they can just do this, that you don't need an institution, training and governing energetic system in a specific kind of dispute because we move past the age of hallucinations. It doesn't sound like that's imminent today, but I don't know if it's imminent six months from now. I mean, I didn't know that I didn't know last weekend that agents were going to be on a subreddit talking about us. You know, I wasn't, I didn't, I didn't know Moltbook was coming, right? So you can surprise me for now, I think you have to have governed transparent audited systems so people can grow that trust. We have a white paper. We led an academic under the tench on Choi, who's actually, he's a law professor, but he's a technologist as well. And we just let him under the tent.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, huge issue, obviously. If you were to just take your dispute, all the documents in some dispute you're having and throw it into ChatGPT or into Claude, you'd get, you could get a result right now, right? Like anybody could do that. It might be okay. It might in some cases not make a mistake, as you know hallucinations are, you don't know when exactly or why the frontier models are making mistakes. But that's not what we built. And that's why we're moving so narrowly and so slowly. Your system has to be governed, trained in and grounded in the kind of reasoning that you're asking it to do. So it sounds extremely narrow that we're doing only documents, only construction cases, but there's a reason for that. That's where we could build. A governed and harnessed, you know, a gentic system. We keep a human in the loop to make sure.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's just I've been operating under that assignment. Yeah, I mean, there is that, so if you think that's a system that instills confidence, like maybe, but not sure everybody would agree with that.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, some people would. And as I'm sure you know, there are lots of things that happen in public dispute resolution systems or in arbitration processes where the results are reported, where there's not a lot of transparency. Like, do you understand how judges come to the conclusions they come to? Like, we don't get to see the reasoning that goes on in their brain. There's no requirement that the judge shows her work and how she got from step A to step D. You know, what was her thought process? I mean, there is a hopefully, you know, most judges are supposed to write opinions that should show some of that. But as you know, in most intermediate appellate courts, there's a lot of opinions that are not written. And in trial courts, very often there's no written opinion. So I always want to ask, as opposed to what? Like if you believe that the current human-led overburdened justice system is one where people have lots of confidence, I want to introduce you to some folks.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. But I mean, so imagine, you know, disputes between those two that could be resolved instead of taking two years. So somebody's waiting for their insurance company to tell the hospital that they're going to cover their treatment and they're dead before they get an answer. Imagine if we could just resolve those right away. But in a system that transparently shows its work and shows its audits, right? You tell me, my guess is some people would say like I'll take that tomorrow, right? I'm waiting for my treatment. Yes, please send my dispute to an arbitration process that is transparent and shows its work. Great.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. It depends on the AI agent who built it, what their audit trail looks like, and how transparent they are about showing you what that audit trail looks like. Let me go back for a minute. I said payer provider disputes. I'm talking about disputes between healthcare, hospitals, and insurance companies. Do you think there's like a lot of confidence or trust in insurance companies? Because I don't think so. So when, you know, if there are...”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things you and I briefly talked about the first time we met and talked about all this was the idea that there's transparency in the state courts. There's transparency when the governments use you and you need that transparency to build trust like you brought up the healthcare industry. There's zero trust in the healthcare industry and there's a lot you could say about the consequences of the absolute lack of trust in the healthcare industry. If my medical billing goes to an AI agent, do you think that's going to result in more or less trust?”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is just my view, but I believe that criminal cases, cases where the government is accusing you of something and wants to take your liberty as a result of that accusation or cases that individuals or organizations or even businesses bring against the government should happen in public courtrooms and with publicly appointed or elected, if you're in state court judges, that those have to happen in courtrooms.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it turns out in lots of industries there are documents only disputes. I was talking to an in-house litigation leader at an energy company and they have supplier disputes that are all documents only disputes and it's probably perfect for those. payer provider disputes, disputes between hospitals and insurers, which are, I'm sure you know like an enormous docket. It's probably perfect for those if you can get them both to agree, you know, time value of money means some people like to hold on to their money and they're willing to have a dispute resolution process take a very long time. Those should be perfect for an AI dispute resolution process, right? We should be resolving those quickly and getting people their coverage. So I think there's actually an unlimited number of disputes for which this is appropriate. There are also some for which it will never be appropriate.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah. Actually, in fact, you're right that many larger construction projects with extremely sophisticated parties on both sides have these smaller disputes along the way for which this tool will probably be perfect. Many of those disputes at this point, they just think are not even worth, you know, even the large parties who know how to access every dispute resolution system don't bring them because it's just not worth their time. And that'll change. This will give everybody an option to resolve every dispute. We're seeing, not yet again, because nobody has it in their contract yet, but our self-represented parties in commercial and construction cases are just on the rise and have been for a couple of years. I mean, I follow our sort of case filings day by day. And the self-represented parties in commercial and construction disputes are right now, I mean, it's one month, so who knows maybe it was.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a gap here that it just seems very striking to me. Party that understands it needs early case evaluation because it is a repeat player in very lucrative construction disputes and they just need to keep moving and sort of the cost of the settlement is enough and they can just keep moving. That's a pretty sophisticated actor. How do you bring all of this down to, well, most people can't even access the justice system? Is there a path? Yeah.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First case came in, I don't know, a couple weeks ago, everybody was so excited. So as you know, in arbitration, both parties, they have to have an arbitration clause in the contract that says we're going to arbitration. So for now, we will not take any case unless both parties agree. And obviously, there's no businesses that have put it in their contract. Well, I hope now there are because we've been talking to people now about it for two months, but we'll start seeing cases once contracts start showing up that have it in their contract. One of the things we've heard from a lot of parties is they're eager to use it as an early case evaluation tool. They want to be able to run it just on their own with their, you know, they want to put all of their evidence up into it and get an early case assessment about where their case is likely to go so they can figure out whether they even want to spend any time in arbitration. So that's actually one of the next use cases we're building out, which isn't very hard based on what we.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do. There's a human arbitrator assigned to the case from the beginning, and anytime the parties want the human arbitrator to come in, the human arbitrator is ready and willing to come in. And you're probably right that there'll be some case where along the way the parties will decide that they need testimony that they didn't think they needed at the front end of the case. And that's probably going to be a case where the human arbitrator takes over because we're not having our agents do that for now. Not in our roadmap today.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it can take witness testimony as long as it's in written form, which you may or may not know this, I didn't until I started in this job. A lot of arbitration disputes have written witness testimony. In fact, most cross-border disputes, that's how they take testimony. It's literally affidavits or just written expert reports more and more in American arbitration cases. It's depositions. So it can do that, but it's not going to take, it's not going to say have a witness show up on Zoom and we're going to listen to them and see if we think they're telling the truth or they're twitching a little in their eye. And so therefore we know they're lying. It's not doing that.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's got to be really cool, you guys. So you have the system now, you have the platform and the frameworks. As you know better than anybody, how the platforms and frameworks are built in the beginning have a pretty big effect on where they end up. And even just talking about witness testimony, right? Okay, now there's a dispute on did it happen before midnight or after midnight and you need the loading dock operator to say actually it was the next day like this document is wrong it's the next day did you build a system that can take witness testimony”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Domain experts to figure out where it's going to impact them. And we started building point solutions. And so our AI engineers were not historic AI engineers, but like everybody else, they learned pretty quickly. And so we do have a very talented set of AI engineers with this particular product we built with a partner. We did co-pilots. We built it with Quantum Black. Quantum Black is McKinsey's AI team. And we did for the first four or five months the QB engineers sat in seat one and ours sat in seat two and then they swapped for the last five months of it so that our team then was driving because they left after we delivered the MVP and now we're already building out the next products that are that are that are built on the same architecture.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Higher in. No, it's a great question. So we started transforming our operation in early 2023. I took this job in September of 2022, but I didn't start until February 2023. And everybody knows that, you know, in November of 2022, we all thought like, oh, wow, what's happening? So I spent most of my six weeks off learning everything I could about large language models and trying to figure out what it was going to mean for the legal profession and therefore, you know, our little subset of the legal profession. And I was convinced it was going to be extremely impactful. You know, like you said, it can make people feel heard. And that's a wake-up call for any dispute resolution provider, right? Like that's obviously going to have an impact. So when I got to the AAA, we gave everybody enterprise chat GPT licenses. And I mean everybody like not just our engineers, but our caseworkers and our legal team and our marketers and our, you know, because I because I think with any general purpose technology, you need the domain expert.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% feel like I'm a 1L back at the University of Wisconsin right now talking about construction litigation and contract disputes in this way so you had the library of previous arbitration in cases that looked very similar to this you obviously have the experience and the history with the industry Did you have the software engineers you needed to build this? How did that work? Did you go higher out to do that? Did you hire in where did this come from?”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you ordered the palette of steel beams. It had a delivery date on it that showed up. You can mark the delivery date and you can say, okay, that's obviously later than what we said. You owe me some money and then you can.”
2026-02-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprising case for AI judges · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT