For the better part of the legal technology revolution, we have focused on a single user: the lawyer.
Whether the conversation is about legal research platforms, document automation, analytics, workflow tools, or generative AI, the central question is usually the same: How can we help attorneys work faster, better, and more efficiently?
This focus makes sense. Lawyers are the primary consumers of legal research. They navigate complex legal questions, interpret precedent, advise clients, prepare arguments, and represent parties before courts. Naturally, legal technology has evolved around their workflows.
Yet in our collective enthusiasm to support the practicing attorney, we may be overlooking another legal professional whose responsibilities are arguably even greater.
The judge.
The Lawyer-Centric Era of Legal Technology
Legal research has traditionally been designed to support advocacy.
The objective has been clear: help lawyers find the strongest authorities, identify persuasive precedent, develop sound arguments, and reduce research time. Success is measured by how effectively legal professionals can serve their clients.
This orientation became even more pronounced with the emergence of predictive analytics and, later, generative AI.
Long before large language models entered the mainstream, legal technology companies were exploring what many referred to as predictive justice: the ability to analyze large collections of case law, identify judicial patterns, detect litigation trends, and help lawyers anticipate outcomes.
Machine learning systems offered insights into how courts had ruled in similar circumstances, how certain judges approached particular issues, and what arguments had historically succeeded.
Generative AI has accelerated this trajectory. Legal professionals can now explore questions conversationally, summarize complex bodies of law, compare authorities, and rapidly surface relevant materials from immense legal databases.
The result is a legal ecosystem increasingly optimized for the lawyer. But what about the person sitting on the other side of the bench?
The Uncomfortable Reality of AI in the Courtroom
The legal profession has already witnessed the risks associated with AI-assisted legal practice.
Numerous examples have emerged of attorneys submitting filings containing fabricated cases, nonexistent authorities, or unverified legal arguments generated by AI systems. Some have faced sanctions. Others have seen their credibility questioned before the court.
These incidents have reinforced an important lesson: legal technology cannot replace professional judgment.
Lawyers remain responsible for verifying sources, validating legal arguments, and ensuring that every authority presented before a court is authentic.
Yet while much attention has been paid to protecting lawyers from AI mistakes, comparatively little attention has been paid to the needs of judges who must evaluate those arguments.
That is a remarkable oversight. Because while lawyers must be right for their clients, judges must be right for society.
The Judge’s Burden Is Different
The attorney’s role is advocacy. The judge’s role is justice. These are not the same thing.
A lawyer enters the courtroom seeking the best possible outcome for a client. A judge enters that same courtroom carrying a far broader responsibility: maintaining the legitimacy of the legal system itself. Every decision has consequences that extend beyond the immediate parties.
Judicial decisions establish precedent. They influence public confidence in institutions. They shape the interpretation of rights, obligations, and societal norms. They affect victims, defendants, businesses, governments, and communities. This fundamentally changes the requirements for legal technology.
If attorneys need accurate research tools to avoid errors and provide effective representation, judges need those capabilities even more. Judges must evaluate competing arguments, verify authorities, identify weaknesses in reasoning, detect unsupported claims, and understand how a particular decision fits within a broader legal framework. The standard is not merely competence. The standard is justice.
The Limits of Purely Rational AI
At first glance, law appears to be an ideal domain for artificial intelligence. Legal reasoning often involves structured analysis, established frameworks, precedent, statutes, and formal logic. Much of legal research can indeed be accelerated through increasingly sophisticated systems. But judicial reasoning is something more. A judgment is not simply the result of executing a legal algorithm. A judge must consider context. A judge must weigh competing interests. A judge must assess fairness. A judge must understand the human consequences of a decision. A judge must balance consistency with compassion.
The law may aspire to reason, but justice has always involved something deeper than pure logic.
The ancient rhetorical concept of pathos reminds us that persuasion, understanding, and judgment are not solely intellectual exercises. Human beings make decisions through a combination of reason, experience, empathy, and moral judgment.
When we speak about the future of legal AI, we often focus on legal reasoning while ignoring judicial reasoning. The distinction matters. One is about determining what the law says. The other is about determining what justice requires.
A Missing Category of Legal Technology
Today, most legal AI solutions are designed to answer questions. They retrieve cases, they summarize precedent, they identify statutory frameworks, they surface relevant information. These capabilities are valuable for judges, just as they are for lawyers.
But future judicial workflows may require something different. Imagine a legal research environment specifically designed for judges. A system that not only retrieves the most authoritative precedent but also enables judges to explore the broader societal context surrounding a decision. A system designed around verification rather than advocacy. A system optimized not to help one side win, but to help justice emerge.
Such a system would still rely on rigorous legal research, trusted databases, transparent reasoning, and high-quality data. Human oversight would remain indispensable. Yet it would acknowledge something today’s discourse often overlooks: judges are not simply consumers of legal information. They are stewards of the legal system. Their needs deserve dedicated attention.
The Human-in-the-Loop Is More Important for Judges Than Anyone Else
The legal industry rightly emphasizes the importance of human oversight in AI-assisted workflows.
In most discussions, however, that human is assumed to be the lawyer. Perhaps we should broaden that perspective. The judge may be the most important human in the loop of all.
The consequences of judicial decisions ripple across society in ways that individual legal representations do not. A flawed argument may harm a client. A flawed judgment may shape an entire area of law. This is why judicial use of AI cannot be reduced to efficiency metrics.
Speed matters. Accuracy matters. Productivity matters. But for judges, trust matters even more. Transparency matters more. Reliability matters more. Human judgment matters most.
The Next Conversation Legal Tech Needs to Have
The legal technology industry has spent years asking how AI can make lawyers more effective. That question remains important; but it is no longer sufficient.
As legal AI continues to mature, we should begin asking a different question:
What does responsible AI look like for the people who ultimately decide what justice means?
The future of legal technology cannot be built solely around advocacy. It must also be built around adjudication.
Because while lawyers are central to the legal system, judges are central to society’s faith in that system; and if we truly believe that legal AI can improve justice, then the next frontier is not simply helping lawyers argue better.
It is helping judges judge better, while preserving the irreplaceable human qualities that make justice possible in the first place.
Based in Montreal, Erik Chiniara is Director of Product Development at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., where he leads the strategy, development, and modernization of legal research platforms and solutions. With a background in law, social sciences, and more than a decade of product leadership experience, he focuses on building customer-centric products that combine legal expertise, advanced technologies, and AI-driven capabilities to help professionals work more effectively and make better-informed decisions.
