Artificial intelligence is already at work in some clerks' offices.

Wally Bishop, Rosie Tabor, Kitt Robbie, and, uh, Speedy are "lights out" for the Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts. "Herbie" is doing the same in Okaloosa County, but on criminal cases instead of civil filings.

The five aren't real people in Clerk Sharon Bock's (Palm Beach) or Clerk J.D. Peacock's (Okaloosa) offices but those who deal with them sometimes speak as if they were. The five are computers, sometimes referred to by Bock and others as robots, who are part of a test program that uses artificial intelligence to handle filed court documents.

Broward County hasn't named its computers, but it's handling redactions in court filings automatically.

"This is the future and it's also the future of the Bar," Bock said. "I'm reading a book called 'Life 3.0' by Max Tegmark and the premise is that the policy around artificial intelligence is going to need to be developed, and I would submit that the Bar and the lawyers need to be absolutely in the forefront of this.

"What we're talking about here is not only a change in the way lawyers operate their offices or the way lawyers operate their business. What we're talking about is an expectation of service by the public."

What Bock's program does is train the four "robots" to read the filed documents, retrieve the necessary information to fill out the necessary docket sheets and get the document into the case management system, and finally put it on the docket where it will be publicly available.

It's an ongoing process. The office began with simple filings--notices of hearings, notices of cancellations, and requests for copies--which have a fairly high volume but low risk if a mistake is made. Now service returns, notices of taking depositions, subpoena lists, and some other functions have been added.

Peacock is working on criminal intake. Arrests generated by the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office are routed through "Herbie" who "puts it in our case initiation system."

The Broward County system, according to Joan Napole, the IT project management office manager, scans incoming documents for sensitive information and removes it. About 20 percent of the filings are automatically docketed.

Cindy Guerra, chief of court operations and official records for Bock, participated in a technology CLE at the Bar's June Annual Convention and said then about 3 percent of the office's court filings were being handled by artificial intelligence. A month later, that number had risen to about 12 percent.

"The computer...