New 'AI Judge' Tool Looks to Automate Decision Making

New 'AI Judge' Tool Looks to Automate Arbitration Decision Making The AI-powered arbitration platform was co-founded by Husch Blackwell partner Brian Potts, Harvard Law School student Kimo Gandall, computer scientist Kenny McLaren. January 29, 2025 at 01:01 AM

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By Benjamin Joyner On February 3, the founders of a new legal tech company hope to upend the practice of arbitration with the release of their new tool, Arbitrus. Arbitrus will be the flagship product of Fortuna Arbitration, co-founded by Harvard Law School student Kimo Gandall, computer scientist Kenny McLaren, and Husch Blackwell partner Brian Potts. Fortuna Arbitration is being operated as a subsidiary of Fortuna-Insights, a legal research company founded by high school friends Gandall and McLaren in 2023. Potts met Gandall and McLaren at a startup incubator in Cambridge, and noted that his involvement with Arbitrus is independent from his work with Husch Blackwell. The founders describe Arbitrus as an “AI judge”, essentially an end-to-end binding arbitration platform developed with generative artificial intelligence. Arbitrus looks to cover the entire arbitration process, including filing, notification, briefing, discovery and hearings on its platform. The product’s initial use-case will be for two party vendor and employment contracts, with intended expansion to areas like landlord-tenant disputes and other types of litigation. Building an AI Judge Arbitrus was built using a combination of commercially available large language models (LLMs) and internally developed classifier models, which perform Arbitrus’ decision-making functions based on historical data. The program was trained on data largely acquired by applying scrapers to publicly available court records. Gandall, McLaren, and Harvard Law graduate Jack Kieffaber have produced a white paper providing a technical outline of how Arbitrus works and the results of tests performed by the tool.

“It looks at a historical net of cases, and then the label outcomes are just how the court decided, in this case how an arbitrator decided,” Gandall said. “And then it's actually able to look at the raw text that we pre-process … and then make an objective decision on that. So the LLMs are actually making no decisions. They're simply retroactively summarizing decisions that our proprietary classifier models make.” The platform will not allow appeals on the merits, but will allow appeals to a human for technical or procedural errors. Gandall told Legaltech News that arbitration provides a good use case for AI because its contractual basis enables the creation of processes designed for AI decision making. “The Federal Arbitration Act effectually allows parties to contract for their dispute resolution mechanism. So on the business side, it makes a lot of sense, because we don't have to basically apply AI to a human workflow, we can build its own workflow, and that optimizes for the system.” Potts agreed that arbitration was a particularly apt use case for AI models, noting that in his experience legal tech offerings aimed at automating decision-making were often more effective than tools intended to make lawyers more efficient. “These tools for at least [in] legal tech are much more valuable at decision making and essentially replacing, and I use that word intentionally, lawyers, rather than making lawyers more efficient.” The Alternative to the Alternative Historically, arbitration has been handled by human arbitrators, in cases where contracting parties agree to take disputes to organizations such as the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and its International Center for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), or JAMS, among others. These organizations have made their own investments in AI in recent years. AAA, for instance, developed ClauseBuilder AI and AAAi Panelist Search, following its acquisition of Resourceful Internet Solutions, the parent company of online dispute resolution platform ODR.com. Gandall indicated that Arbitrus differs from other arbitration products by allowing the software itself to make decisions, and from other gen AI offerings by using LLMs to explain the decision-making processes performed by other models. “Other products aren't making decisions,” Gandall said. “What makes ours different is it's not just LLMs … but it's classifier models that are actually making the decision.” Potts added that other arbitration tools were attempting a fundamentally different procedure than what Arbitrus is after. “They're trying to make the lawyers in the normal arbitration process write their briefs faster … We're skipping way ahead to ‘Hey, really the use of this tech is better as the decision-making tool, not the replacing of the lawyers, but the replacing of the judge or the arbitrator.’ More broadly, the founders argue that the arbitration system is currently failing to work as intended. “When the original idea came about, it was effectively to make a pathway that was less resistant than court and more efficient than court,” Potts said. “It is more efficient than court, but it's maybe half the cost of court or a quarter, but it's not significantly cheaper and significantly faster.” Gandall and Potts hope that Arbitrus will be able to provide an inexpensive and more transparent alternative to traditional arbitration. “AI helps expand access to justice, because it's able to efficiently adjudicate these cases without putting up enormous amounts of capital,” Gandall said. Gandall also addressed concerns about giving AI systems decision-making power. “AI is going to be biased too, but that bias is transparent, and that's the important thing, so that you expect a certain outcome, and you know what you're getting into … At some point, a court is going to look at this, and it's going to look at the bias, and there's going to be a paper trail. And the paper trail is very simple. It's in the model weights, so you can conduct empirical studies, and I think that's what's important.” Potts added that trust in and adoption of AI systems could help relieve heavy loads. “Of course there's still going to be lawyers, there's still going to be high dollar disputes … . But this, if it takes off, could help unclog the court system of all the lower dollar stuff that is just as important to the individuals who are having that dispute, but now they're waiting in the court system.”