Manufacturing, finance, and the communications industry have in the last decade all come to rely upon artificial intelligence. But there's one industry that continues to put up resistance: the legal profession. The idea of a machine making legal decisions was long considered by opponents to be dangerous and ethically untenable. That's about to change, says John Zeleznikow, a computer scientist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Zeleznikow believes AI is about to improve people's access to justice and massively reduce the costs of running legal services.

Joining forces with Andrew Stranieri at the University of Ballarat, also in Victoria, Zeleznikow launched startup JustSys to develop AI-based online legal systems that don't overstep the ethical line. Judges already use one program to assist them in the complicated and arcane process of sentencing criminals. Divorce lawyers and mediators are using another, called SplitUp, to help couples settle property disputes without resorting to the courts.