COVID-19 brought a myriad of issues, but Malaysia’s workforce felt these impacts incredibly hard due to pay cuts, delayed salaries, and wrongful termination. As such, Malaysian workers are constantly engaged in various legal disputes with employers without proper professional assistance, and to most, hiring private legal counsel is too expensive. In an attempt to aid employees (as well as employers), the innovative Shang & Co developed “Malaysia’s first artificial legal assistant” – AskAILA.
AskAILA was designed to be a “pre-emptive solution for both parties” when seeking legal advice concerning employment issues. This software-based artificial intelligence (AI) is equipped with Malaysian labour statute and has access to regulation and dispute resolution strategies to support national Human Resources workers. By having machine learning identify an individual’s legal issue, AskAILA improves efficiency and ensures that senior lawyers can quickly solve the issue, especially when time and resources are finite. AskAILA also has access to various sample legal documents and checklists “to eliminate errors and non-compliance to save litigation costs and damages.”
However, this legal AI will not replace a traditional lawyer. Despite minimising procedural errors and saving applicants money, AskAILA remains as a tool to supplement Shang & Co’s team of expert lawyers. Legal AI is presently rudimentary, mostly being used as a sift to quickly access documents or acts as preliminary guidance to identify a legal issue. Legal AI fails to consider outside evidence, personal emotion, economic condition and other external factors, ultimately providing the objectively ‘best solution’ rather one that is most appropriate in the circumstances. At its current stage, human lawyers will continue to be necessary to solve the legal problem, but it is possible that machine learning will advance to a point in the distant future where human lawyers will merely act as overseers to their technological counterparts. Regardless, AskAILA will be instrumental in Malaysia’s employment sector overcoming the impact of COVID-19. For the time being, we are here to stay!