Predictive Analytics
AI and the Legal Renaissance
February 22, 2017
When AI first reached the ears of the legal market some years ago there was a flurry of stories about the end of lawyers. For years afterward and with Pavlov dogs-like automation any mention of legal AI summoned up the panicked refrain: ‘The end of lawyers is coming, the end of lawyers is coming!’ This was until law firms and corporates actually started to make use of legal AI systems, especially in the last two years and even more so last year. The clichéd refrain, now exposed to the cleansing...
February 22, 2017
When AI first reached the ears of the legal market some years ago there was a flurry of stories about the end of lawyers. For years afterward and with Pavlov dogs-like automation any mention of legal AI summoned up the panicked refrain: ‘The end of lawyers is coming, the end of lawyers is coming!’ This was until law firms and corporates actually started to make use of legal AI systems, especially in the last two years and even more so last year. The clichéd refrain, now exposed to the cleansing...
The Lasting 6%: My Impressions Of The 2017 Legaltech Show
February 22, 2017
But, what I’ve been asking myself in the two weeks following Legaltech is why certain things were sticking out in my memory and others had already faded. In other words, what made it into my 6%? So with no further ado, here are my impressions from three days at Legaltech. 2. The cloud is here. I know this because this year NO ONE was talking about the cloud. That said, it’s crazy finding out how many Fortune 500 cloud companies keep their own data behind the firewall. That feels...
February 22, 2017
But, what I’ve been asking myself in the two weeks following Legaltech is why certain things were sticking out in my memory and others had already faded. In other words, what made it into my 6%? So with no further ado, here are my impressions from three days at Legaltech. 2. The cloud is here. I know this because this year NO ONE was talking about the cloud. That said, it’s crazy finding out how many Fortune 500 cloud companies keep their own data behind the firewall. That feels...
Seyfarth Shaw Puts ‘Software Robots’ to Use in Automation Push
February 21, 2017
Seyfarth Shaw is already well-known in the legal industry as a pioneer of using business process improvement to make their work more efficient. Now the firm is breaking ground with the use of “software robots.” Seyfarth will announce Tuesday a licensing deal with Blue Prism, which makes software that it says can automate almost any task a human performs on a computer at one-third the cost of a person. Seyfarth and Blue Prism Group plc, which has about 200 customers including large banks and accounting...
February 21, 2017
Seyfarth Shaw is already well-known in the legal industry as a pioneer of using business process improvement to make their work more efficient. Now the firm is breaking ground with the use of “software robots.” Seyfarth will announce Tuesday a licensing deal with Blue Prism, which makes software that it says can automate almost any task a human performs on a computer at one-third the cost of a person. Seyfarth and Blue Prism Group plc, which has about 200 customers including large banks and accounting...
Lex Machina’s New Analytics Apps Explore Damages and Parties
February 20, 2017
Damages Explorer The Damages Explorer is unlike any of Lex Machina’s other apps. It enables users to search, analyze and compare damage awards. It includes the capability to analyze damages awarded by a particular judge, in a certain court and of a certain type, such as attorneys’ fees or infringement damages. Parties Comparator The Parties Comparator would be familiar to anyone who has used either the Courts & Judges Comparator or the Law Firms Comparator. It allows users...
February 20, 2017
Damages Explorer The Damages Explorer is unlike any of Lex Machina’s other apps. It enables users to search, analyze and compare damage awards. It includes the capability to analyze damages awarded by a particular judge, in a certain court and of a certain type, such as attorneys’ fees or infringement damages. Parties Comparator The Parties Comparator would be familiar to anyone who has used either the Courts & Judges Comparator or the Law Firms Comparator. It allows users...
Efficient Breach Experiments
February 20, 2017
As Maria Bigoni (economics--Univ. Bologna) et al. note, courts, judges, and citizens seem ambivalent with respect to the notion of the efficient breach that is taught in most first-year contracts classes. According to the authors, "laymen seem to track consequentialist (economic) reasoning in cases of loss-avoiding breach, while being deontological (moralist) in cases of gain-seeking breach." Such instincts typically reflect a "simplistic" grouping of efficient breach cases. In Unbundling Efficient...
February 20, 2017
As Maria Bigoni (economics--Univ. Bologna) et al. note, courts, judges, and citizens seem ambivalent with respect to the notion of the efficient breach that is taught in most first-year contracts classes. According to the authors, "laymen seem to track consequentialist (economic) reasoning in cases of loss-avoiding breach, while being deontological (moralist) in cases of gain-seeking breach." Such instincts typically reflect a "simplistic" grouping of efficient breach cases. In Unbundling Efficient...
Loop, the Legal AI Assistant You Talk To
February 19, 2017
Most, if not all, legal AI applications at the moment are text-based rather than voice-based. But, now here comes Loop, which offers the general public the ability to use spoken natural language processing (NLP) to find legal information. The Philadelphia-based start-up got going about one year ago and is this year in the process of coming fully to market. Artificial Lawyer spoke to one of the co-founders, Peter McCann about this ‘Legal Siri’. McCann begins by noting that at 37 years old he is in fact...
February 19, 2017
Most, if not all, legal AI applications at the moment are text-based rather than voice-based. But, now here comes Loop, which offers the general public the ability to use spoken natural language processing (NLP) to find legal information. The Philadelphia-based start-up got going about one year ago and is this year in the process of coming fully to market. Artificial Lawyer spoke to one of the co-founders, Peter McCann about this ‘Legal Siri’. McCann begins by noting that at 37 years old he is in fact...
Quantitative Legal Prediction – or – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry
February 18, 2017
Do I have a case? What is our likely exposure? How much is this going to cost? What will happen if we leave this particular provision out of this contract? How can we best staff this particular legal matter? These are core questions asked by sophisticated clients such as general counsels as well as consumers at the retail level. Whether generated by a mental model or a sophisticated algorithm, prediction is a core component of the guidance that lawyers offer. Indeed, it is by generating informed...
February 18, 2017
Do I have a case? What is our likely exposure? How much is this going to cost? What will happen if we leave this particular provision out of this contract? How can we best staff this particular legal matter? These are core questions asked by sophisticated clients such as general counsels as well as consumers at the retail level. Whether generated by a mental model or a sophisticated algorithm, prediction is a core component of the guidance that lawyers offer. Indeed, it is by generating informed...
In a Pittsburgh Casino, AI is Beating Poker Champions
February 18, 2017
The night before his newest poker competition was set to begin, Carnegie Mellon’s Tuomas Sandholm and his PhD student Noam Brown sat down to play a little No Limit Texas Hold’em against the main competition: the artificial intelligence program they designed called “Libratus.” “I was totally wrecked,” Sandholm told The Washington Post. The machine destroyed him. But he is not a serious poker player, so that’s not such a big achievement. For the past 13 days, however, Libratus has been...
February 18, 2017
The night before his newest poker competition was set to begin, Carnegie Mellon’s Tuomas Sandholm and his PhD student Noam Brown sat down to play a little No Limit Texas Hold’em against the main competition: the artificial intelligence program they designed called “Libratus.” “I was totally wrecked,” Sandholm told The Washington Post. The machine destroyed him. But he is not a serious poker player, so that’s not such a big achievement. For the past 13 days, however, Libratus has been...
The Mind Bleeds Into the World
February 17, 2017
Coming very soon is going to be augmented reality technology, where you see not only the physical world, but also virtual objects and entities that you perceive in the middle of them. We’ll put on augmented reality glasses and we’ll have augmented entities out there. My face recognition is not so great, but my augmented glasses will tell me, "Ah, that’s John Brockman." A bit of AI inside my augmented reality glasses will recognize people for me. At that level, artificial intelligence will...
February 17, 2017
Coming very soon is going to be augmented reality technology, where you see not only the physical world, but also virtual objects and entities that you perceive in the middle of them. We’ll put on augmented reality glasses and we’ll have augmented entities out there. My face recognition is not so great, but my augmented glasses will tell me, "Ah, that’s John Brockman." A bit of AI inside my augmented reality glasses will recognize people for me. At that level, artificial intelligence will...
Deep Learning Will Radically Change the Ways We Interact with Technology
February 16, 2017
Over the last half-dozen years, deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence inspired by the structure of the human brain, has made enormous strides in giving machines the ability to intuit the physical world. At Facebook’s AI lab, they’ve built a deep learning system capable of answering simple questions to which it had never previously been exposed. The Echo, Amazon’s smart speaker, uses deep learning techniques. Three years ago, Microsoft’s chief research officer impressed attendees...
February 16, 2017
Over the last half-dozen years, deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence inspired by the structure of the human brain, has made enormous strides in giving machines the ability to intuit the physical world. At Facebook’s AI lab, they’ve built a deep learning system capable of answering simple questions to which it had never previously been exposed. The Echo, Amazon’s smart speaker, uses deep learning techniques. Three years ago, Microsoft’s chief research officer impressed attendees...
