The European Union's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act represents a pioneering legislative framework designed to regulate AI systems. Initially introduced in 2021, the proposed legislation in its current state contains three key aspects that will carry profound implications for legal technology and the broader legal community[1]. The European Parliament is set to vote on the legislation in mid-March, and if passed, the law would take full effect in 2026—giving AI systems developers and users two years to ensure compliance[2].
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- Written by: Liam Heusel
The Legal Technology Laboratory is now housed under the Center for Law, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation (CLEI) as one of its “Community of Practice” networks. The CLEI, led by the UMKC School of Law, is a dynamic platform for multidisciplinary collaboration that focuses on education, service to the community, and investment in strategic networks to sponsor innovation and bridge gaps in access to justice.
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This post explores President Biden's recent executive order on artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting its comprehensive approach to managing AI's development and use. The directive acknowledges AI's potential benefits and risks, focusing on ensuring safety and security in its application.
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This post examines the critical role of data security in the legal sector, highlighting the urgency for law firms and court systems to enhance cyber defenses in the face of escalating ransomware attacks and cyber threats, and underscoring strategies for mitigating these risks.
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This post summarizes Dr. Maura Grossman's lecture at the National eDiscovery Leadership Institute, focusing on the impact and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal field. Dr. Grossman discusses AI's evolution, including Narrow and General AI, and advancements in machine learning and natural language processing. She highlights generative AI tools like ChatGPT in legal services, addressing their capabilities and challenges like inherent biases. The post emphasizes the need for transparency and fairness in AI applications, particularly in the legal sector.
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Judges from around the nation provide insight from the bench as they address the latest developments and ethical issues surrounding Generative AI.
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This post explores generative AI's potential across various sectors, emphasizing the art of effective prompting. It introduces Professor Kennedy's innovative techniques, such as the Persona-Context-Request-Output (PCRO) and Group Advisory Layer (G-A-L) methods, for maximizing AI interactions.
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This post highlights the increasing importance of technology in legal practice. Georgia State's model emphasizes integrating tech into legal education. Derived from the ABA's guidelines, it's based on the BASE foundation: Basic Applications, Software, and Expectations. It categorizes tech competency into four areas, ensuring lawyers remain up-to-date.
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This post discusses a Task Force from law.MIT.edu's efforts to integrate ethical standards with generative AI in law. Their June 2023 guidelines detail seven AI usage principles for lawyers. With examples for clarity, they're now developing a more comprehensive Version 0.3, aiming for diverse insights and understanding current AI applications.
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This post delves into the increasing need for robust data governance by local governments, introducing the MetroLab Network's Data Governance and Policy Guide. Originating from Professor Luppino's "Smart Cities: Data Handling and Privacy" project, the Guide aids local governments in managing and utilizing data responsibly, while highlighting its ethical foundation and ongoing development.
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This post provides an update on the UMKC Expungement Clinic's role in the Clear My Record Project, detailing its support for individuals seeking expungement in Missouri. It also mentions a significant $700,000 grant received in 2021, which has furthered research, policy work, and legislative changes to enhance the expungement process.
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OpenLaw has continued to grow into one of the premier smart (legal) contracting platforms in the blockchain space. It is an open source project that has worked with a number of different law firms, trade organization, RocketLawyer, and has been developing some interesting proof of concepts around land title transfer, media, real time payment and tax collection, etc.
Tweet highlights from 2019: https://twitter.com/OpenLawOfficial/status/1216737713145204737
OpenLaw’s medium has write-ups related to the rest: https://medium.com/@OpenLawOfficial
Read more about the Developing New Applications for Smart Contracts Project
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We are currently rolling out a new data standard for Legal Services groups and courts, on schema.org mark up. This should improve their placement and jurisdiction correctness on searches. We have run a large-scale audit, to document the current problems on Google search, when it comes to people seeking legal help and getting misinformation. We will do a second audit, after the mark-up has been applied, to see how this affect the algorithms placement of legal help resources.
We are also developing a taxonomy of legal problems that people experience in the US. This is being used to build natural language classifiers to automatically spot people's legal issues, in their posts or in their searches. This is in collaboration with Suffolk University's lit lab and Pew charitable trusts.
Read more about the Building a Smarter Legal Internet Search Project
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The LTL website now has a searchable inventory of “Law and Technology Curriculum” offerings across U.S. Law Schools, containing information on over 1,000 offerings. This tool has multiple filters to help users navigate to offerings of particular interest to them. These filters include, among other search facilitators:
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In late September of 2019, a discussion draft of the Model Data Handling Policy was vetted at a Roundtable Session at the MetroLab Network’s annual Summit, with participants including representatives of multiple cities, counties, and academic institutions from across the United States. Feedback was collected and summarized in a draft report circulated to participants for comment. Currently efforts are in process to organize a multi-cities and universities working group to “crowdsource” the next iteration of the Model Data Handling Policy.
To review the current draft of the Model Data Handling Policy, see link.
Read more about the Smart Cities Data Handling and Privacy Project
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The students and faculty at Brooklyn Law (through support from the Legal Technology Lab) initially created a scripted dialogue interface to help small businesses and entrepreneurs better understand the GDPR, and to figure out when they might run afoul of the GDPR (see learning tool at https://potkewitz.github.io/QnA/GDPR_Learner.html and letter tool at https://potkewitz.github.io/QnA/GDPR_Letter.html). The knowledge gained from building the rudimentary GDPR tool has subsequently been applied by more recent student teams (through a “Justice Lab”) to build chatbots, apps, sites scripting laws, regulations, and policies to help different constituencies, mostly vulnerable, marginalized communities and individuals without ready access to legal support to better understand their rights and responsibilities. Among the tools that Brooklyn Law students have built since the LTL GDPR project are projects designed to help vulnerable individuals with family law matters, workers’ rights issues (notably restaurant workers and sex workers), and access to government services.
Read more about the Smart Compliance and GDPR Project
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We have completed the FCC Explorer project and it will be placed permanently on the MSU website on spring of 2020 for public use.
Read more about the Data Analytics and FCC Policy Making Project
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The Expungement Project grew out of the Law, Technology, and Public Policy class at the UMKC School of Law, and developed as a partnership with Code for KC, the Kansas City Brigade of Code for America. It is designed to assist individuals who may be eligible for expungement of criminal offenses but who cannot afford the normal charges for a lawyer. It now includes an important collaboration with the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office and its Smart Prosecution Initiative Strategic Plan.
Read more about Clear My Record/Expungement Project
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The most recent LTL Event was held at the Kauffman Conference Center in Kansas City on November 16-17. Over the course of two days, approximately 65 members of the extended LTL Community were able to experience the full portfolio of LTL projects from all of the Project Leaders in detail, as well as to engage in a working session to create a new financial instrument to support entrepreneurs and job creation.
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On September 8 and 9, more than 50 participants gathered at the Stanford Law School for an initial working session on the Legal Specification Protocol (LSP). This LTL supported initiative gathered stakeholders ranging from entrepreneurial business leaders to legal service providers, technology companies, academics, and government agencies to begin a process that will lead to the promulgation of a coordinated, interoperable standard for embodying contracts and other legal formulations as executable computer code.
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Development of OpenLaw has proceeded at a rapid pace, enabling (for the first time) the creation and execution of legal agreements that rely on a blockchain for storage and digital signatures, while at the same time permitting the execution of blockchain-based smart contracts. Cardozo students assisted with the creation of two legal agreements that rely on OpenLaw’s legal markup language—an employee offer letter and a token purchase agreement.
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Law professors from Vermont Law School and UMKC are working with others in an interdisciplinary team to explore what types of data are being collected in smart city deployments and open data initiatives.
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- Written by: Super User