From Law360: BigLaw’s High Costs Drive Cos. Toward Boutique Law Firms. I expect the same forces that are driving companies to engage smaller law firms (i.e., desire for better, faster, cheaper services) are driving them to Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) and firms employing technology to better leverage their attorneys’ work.
From Dentons: From hipster antitrust to Big Data: fresh challenges to competition law? “(The Canadian Competition Bureau) does recognize that big data may facilitate innovative ways of implementing and verifying compliance with a cartel agreement; however, it states that it is “premature” to provide guidance on situations where competitor agreements are achieved through artificial intelligence without the intervention of humans.”
Cool move by K&L Gates: “Two Carnegie Mellon University faculty members have been appointed to new professorships created with funding from the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies at CMU. The professorships will enable CMU to continue its leadership in the ethical, social and policy issues that arise as artificial intelligence and other computing technologies increasingly reshape society and daily life.”
From Jones Day: Protecting Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Innovations Through Patents: Functional Claiming. “While patents are not necessarily the only, or the best, protection in a given instance for AI and BD innovation, where patent protection is sought, practitioners need to pay attention to issues of functional claiming as well as issues of subject matter eligibility under Alice in order to execute successful patent coverage for AI and BD innovation.”
This report (Artificial Intelligence and your business: A guide for navigating the legal, policy, commercial, and strategic challenges ahead) is an excellent piece from Hogan Lovells. It doesn’t dig deeply into any area, put it points out the significant issues raised by AI in several practice areas, client industries and geographies. Marketing done well.
Here’s a thought provoking post from Attorney at Work: Do Lawyers Have an Ethical Responsibility to Use AI?
Here’s a quick overview of the evolution of chatbots. “With the continuous evolvement in artificial intelligence, developers are making chatbots more human-like with personalities, capable of recognizing speech patterns and can interpret non-verbal cues to make interactions more effortless.”
And a thought provoking piece, this time from Above the Law. (I probably should have saved these for Friday). Machine Learning And Human Values: Can They Be Reconciled? “Taken as a whole, artificial intelligence will promote justice and prosperity — but as with any technology, it presents some ethical challenges.”
Microsoft hasn’t been quite as overt about its AI focus as Google/Alphabet and Amazon, but with its recent reorganization it has become more explicit about its “initiative to integrate artificial intelligence into every product and service offered”. Here’s a good overview of their stated plans.
From Scientific American: It’s Not My Fault, My Brain Implant Made Me Do It. As AI evolves into “augmented intelligence,” we will have a whole new raft of issues to deal with. “Where does responsibility lie if a person acts under the influence of their brain implant? As a neuroethicist and a legal expert, we suggest that society should start grappling with these questions now, before they must be decided in a court of law.” “Newer implants may have wireless connectivity. Hackers could attack such implants to use Ms. Q for their own (possibly nefarious) purposes, posing more challenges to questions of responsibility. Insulin pumps and implantable cardiac defibrillators have already been hacked in real life.”