Monkey’s attorney

* Regulators tell Elon Musk that he can’t start putting chips in people’s brains. GAH! Kill a monkey (or 1500) and suddenly the bureaucrats in Washington won’t let you do anything anymore. [Reuters]

* “Murdaugh Committed Murders As Career Spiraled” should be every attorney’s defense to a rough month… “I know I just considered taking my book of business to Jones Day, but I could’ve done a double murder.” [Law360]

* Biden administration plans to shift the liability for hacks to software manufacturers. This policy seems stupid but at least the president is trying to address the harms of massive data breaches instead of having public fever dreams about drag story time. America is broken. [Bloomberg Law News]

* After securing abortion restrictions, the new right-wing legal mission is advocating for strict voting restrictions. [ProPublica]

* Legal technology made the national news! Our coverage was better. [MSNBC]

* Let the battle for AI supremacy in Biglaw begin! [Legaltech News]

The post Morning Docket: 03.02.23 appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

I thought about how many times I had to have this talk with a witness while I watched Casetext CEO Jake Heller and Chief Innovation Officer Pablo Arredondo demonstrate their latest offering, Co-Counsel. Because of all the skills it brings to the legal AI game, the most impressive is the ability to know what it doesn’t know.

Amid all this hype about ChatGPT and “generative AI” and clickbaity headlines either lamenting or trumpeting the decline of lawyers before Bing’s unflinching contempt, most folks are overlooking how often these tools are just plain… wrong. It’s been described ChatGPT as “Mansplaining As A Service” and that sounds about right.

It can hallucinate up an answer to queries and explain it just confidently enough to lead everyone astray. Arredondo relayed a story about testing an AI system that gaslit him about a case he litigated — right up to sending him “proof” in the form of a made-up URL link. If the challenge for legal AI over the course of the next year is solving the “garbage in” problem of running to bad data, then the metachallenge is getting AI that won’t even try it.

As for the first challenge:

To tailor general AI technology for the demands of legal practice, Casetext established a robust trust and reliability program managed by a dedicated team of AI engineers and experienced litigation and transactional attorneys. Casetext’s Trust Team, which has run every legal skill on the platform through thousands of internal tests, has spent nearly 4,000 hours training and fine-tuning CoCounsel’s output based on over 30,000 legal questions. Then, all CoCounsel applications were used extensively by a group of beta testers composed of over four hundred attorneys from elite boutique and global law firms, in-house legal departments, and legal aid organizations, before being deployed. These lawyers and legal professionals have already used CoCounsel more than 50,000 times in their day-to-day work.

The user interface resembles a standard chatbot. From there, the system can perform a number of specific legal tasks. But, importantly, tasks that attorneys might actually want an AI to perform.

Because it’s Casetext, obviously it can aid in legal research:

Takes the natural language question, breaks it down, runs the query, summarizes the results AND gives the attorney access to the cases. Not a surprising feature necessarily, but it betrays a critical distinction between serious AI and the fun and games. The parlor trick is “generative” AI, giggling that it can write some output. Far more important is the AI’s ability to recognize and break down the request. Co-Counsel is crafting a number of research queries off that question, just like one would expect a junior lawyer to perform. And then it’s taking the results and reading those and drawing conclusions to guide the attorney when digging into the results.

But, while cool, the other tasks that Co-Counsel tackles impressed me more.

Taking a deposition? Ask the system to come up with some questions on some key topics and it’ll spit out a ready-made outline. The example run for me involved a hypothetical bribery case and it had questions prepared with the names of the parties that asked about the elements of the cause of action. It’s not the end of the prep, but it’s lopping an hour of drudgery off of it.

The transactional lawyer isn’t left out either. Co-Counsel can scour a draft agreement to ensure it meets requirements that you select and it’ll not only figure it out, but suggest a redline where the draft falls short.

Catching up on the facts of the matter? Feed it a bunch of documents and it’ll provide a summary to keep the lawyer from wasting valuable time digging through each paper. If you’re looking for something more specific, ask the system to analyze a universe of documents with an eye toward specific issues:

This was just dragging and dropping documents into the UI and it’s handing over a Reader’s Digest version.

For something more robust than a summary, the user can point the system toward a bunch of documents and ask specific questions about the contents to get something like this…

Casetext ran me through a slightly different example than the one pictured to allow me to choose my own queries. We examined this body of Obama speeches for insights into whether or not he told a joke, alluded to a tragedy, and to ascertain his views on immigration. But for illustrative purposes the image gets to the heart of it. The system will not just relay the answer, but tell you if it can’t be certain and then, if the user hovers over the answer, it’ll explain why. In my demo, if it saw text that might be funny but wasn’t clearly a laugh line — like a dad joke — it would flag it and offer its reasoning and provide a link so the user can jump to the passage and check it out.

Let’s face it, lawyers don’t want and aren’t going to depend on an AI’s scan of the document any more than they rely on a summer associate’s. We’re in “trust but verify” territory as Arredondo put it. Attorneys need a system that quickly flags “yes, no, and maybe” and then provides a fast way for the experienced lawyer to look over the merits of each call.

That’s where AI provides the most value to lawyers. It’s not about replacing the human that makes the decision, it’s about replacing the write-off hours sending a junior off to slap together drafts. And like that junior, the AI isn’t going to know everything. Unlike that junior, Co-Counsel is going to transparently provide the attorney with a full grasp of the bases of what it does and does not know.

Which might sound like a knock to a non-lawyer who, like the witnesses described at the beginning, think that they’re being helpful when they volunteer their own speculation based on incomplete evidence. But it’s more helpful to be accurate.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

The post Legal AI Knows What It Doesn’t Know Which Makes It Most Intelligent Artificial Intelligence Of All appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

Or maybe don’t….

Hehehe, serving your mom. Nice.

Let this be a reminder to keep your friends close, and the IT department closer — but maybe not this close.

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post Law Firm IT Department Prank Results In This Incredibly Silly Email Signature appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

For any media company, there are style guides, editorial policies, review processes, and editing. While some companies follow comprehensive policies and processes with rigor, others might not. Similarly, while some companies are transparent about their policies, others aren’t transparent.

Law Firms Should Consider How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Support Their Brand

With AI already a major factor in legal technology in 2023, law firms must assess the technology’s role in their business. Law firms are already posting job openings for “Legal Prompt Engineers,” and Allen & Overy is one of the first major law firms to deploy a firmwide GPT application.

In addition to broad-scale large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or the new Bing chat-assisted search, any organization that trains AI or that produces content with AI will likely want to consider developing a policy.

What techniques are used to query an LLM? The way a content creator queries an LLM will matter. New techniques like Chain Prompts help LLMs explain their logic more transparently. This can help with human review.

Organizations that will create content using AI will want to consider how AI is trained, how AI is instructed, how AI formats output, and how AI-generated content is reviewed before publishing.

Just as large media companies stake their brands on the finished work product, so do law firms. An editor will review a news story while a partner will review an associate’s memo, whether generated by an AI or a human.

Relating Editorial Policy To AI

Few people have heard of Meta’s Galactica LLM, even though it was released in demo form two weeks prior to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Why? Because it was pulled down just three days later, after its responses exhibited bias and spewed nonsense. Galactica’s AI training was not as good as ChatGPT’s, and consumers of Galactica got to see the nonsense firsthand.

AI-generated content and LLMs are in their infancy. New policies, guidelines, and styles will need to be developed for AI-generated content. After all, content is content, whether generated by humans, machines, or humans and machines.

What is the role of AI training in creating consistent output? What is the role and responsibility of those that generate AI content to review it, similar to that of an editor? Galactica’s output was analogous to a media company hiring journalists and untrained writers alike. But not only that, it was equivalent to publishing with little or no editorial review.

Part of the success of ChatGPT is that significant chunks of objectionable content were tagged as such so the AI training would recognize ugly content like hate speech, sexual abuse, torture, and worse.

In the analogy above, ChatGPT’s AI training has standardized more of the writing. It has reduced the number of untrained writers in the analogy but still has a ways to go. ChatGPT output will require review, similar to an editor, in most use cases. That applies even if the content will only be consumed by the user who created it.

A Glimpse Into Training ChatGPT

A little-known fact is that a lot of the dirty work in finding objectionable content and removing it from the AI training sets used by ChatGPT was initially outsourced to workers in Kenya. The steps to create ethical AI and responsible AI in ChatGPT required some poor souls to review some horrific content. That may bother some readers as it bothers me. Just realize the concept isn’t new. Some people play similar roles in the media industry. Video editors watch some pretty horrific content during the editing process and then pixelate the images or cut away at just the right time to protect the broader viewing audience.

AI Editorial Policies Have Parallels To Traditional Content Creation Editorial Policies

There are parallels between AI content creation and traditional content creation. The decisions made by the Kenyan workers under the direction of OpenAI represent a de facto AI training policy. The de facto policy will evolve, and it is unknown if OpenAI will ever summarize or publish a training policy.

More than 175 billion machine learning parameters are in the GPT-3 model, and GPT-4 will likely measure machine learning parameters in the trillions, which will noticeably improve its ability to answer questions accurately.

When an AI service provider eventually publishes their AI training policy, it will help explain the output to those creating content. This will help explain what is intentional policy and what is AI bias or error that needs to be corrected. AI training won’t ever filter out everything.

Regulation Is Probably Inevitable

If self-regulation and disclosure don’t occur, you can be sure legislative bodies will begin to require disclosures. In 2021, the European Union began to propose a regulatory framework for AI.

The awareness of AI-related issues is ramping up faster than that of Internet-related issues. Similar events occurred in the early days of the Internet when privacy was a concern. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and TRUSTe (now TrustArc) advocated for personal liberties and voluntary disclosures to protect the privacy and rights of individuals. Eventually, privacy policies became standard fare on websites. However, the GDPR and CCPA laws and regulations now define much of what can be done with personal identifiable information.

We are quickly entering new territory here and taking the necessary steps to be prepared for what may come is essential. Let’s learn from others that have already traveled a similar journey.

Ken Crutchfield is Vice President and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., a leading provider of information, business intelligence, regulatory and legal workflow solutions. Ken has more than three decades of experience as a leader in information and software solutions across industries. He can be reached at ken.crutchfield@wolterskluwer.com.

The post What The AI Industry Can Learn From The Media Industry appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

(Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)

* Law firms get conservative on legal technology amid recession fears. I guess this means they aren’t trying to bring in tech to reduce attorney ranks. [Legaltech News]

* Rupert Murdoch acknowledges in testimony that Fox News lied about the election. Did these people even have in-house counsel in 2020? [Law360]

* Merrick Garland’s appearance on Capitol Hill tomorrow will very much suck for him. [Esquire]

* The ongoing Neil Gerrard scandal will go to court next week to find out just how much Dechert owes one of its former clients. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Florida court denies the habeas petition a pregnant detainee filed on behalf of her fetus. As always “Life Begins At Conception… Some Terms and Conditions Apply.” [The Guardian]

The post Morning Docket: 02.28.23 appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

The HR manager is frantic about an employee issue that needs your attention

Your day is booked with calls till 6 p.m., when you’ll arrive at the city council meeting you’re part of, and you have 124 unopened emails in your inbox. 

Ding! Make that 125 unopened emails.

Years ago as a rookie GC, I quickly learned to delegate tasks (and entire projects when possible) to support professionals and other lawyers. It helps junior attorneys build specific expertise, and I would’ve been entirely overwhelmed otherwise. Here are three ways to make delegating smart and effective.

Reevaluate The Alleged Urgency Of Requests

Often, better communication is needed rather than a full-blown emergency response. Before prioritizing your to-do list, ask: 

1. What are the sources of the given time constraints? As you’ll see below, it’s easy to overestimate the urgency of a request.
2. Who could I talk with to inquire about adding flexibility to the project?
3. Is there one part I can quickly complete while sending the rest to others to handle? 
4. Can I change the scope of the project? 
5. Who else can assist and perform these tasks?

Visually Supplement Your Communications

Succinctly declare your expectations for response and task completion times in your communications. Be specific and clear. And visually format your written delegation messages consistently to help readers see relevant details quickly. 

Set the information apart using a separate heading, bold font, or color. Underline or highlight it. Make your response and completion times stand out, and use the same format every time. Don’t hesitate to throw in an emoji or meme when it can help others laugh, smile, and understand you.

Visuals can help prevent email urgency bias. Research shows that receivers often overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to nonurgent work emails sent outside typical work hours, i.e., others may mistakenly claim urgency when there isn’t any.   

Use Technology To Track Tasks

Some 84% of lawyers rely on email for task management, and 85% use email as a system of record for client projects. Nearly half (45%) of 500 in-house legal counsel surveyed spend three or more hours a day managing their team, determining workload capacity, individual task status, and managing internal processes.

Why, when technology has long been available to streamline and automate the task management process? Relying on email alone is not only time-consuming and error-prone, but it also prevents you from tracking who does what, the types and volumes of tasks, and completion times. Data on these factors can help your team eliminate workflow bottlenecks and anticipate resource needs more accurately going forward.

Imagine getting more than three hours a day back. What would you do with it? Spend more time with family? Work on a passion project? Or tackle your overflowing inbox, which (ding!) is now up to 200 unopened emails?

Olga V. Mack is the VP at LexisNexis and CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat, Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and  Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on Visual IQ for Lawyers, her next book (ABA 2023). You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.

The post Delegate And Elevate: 3 Genuinely Helpful Tips To Go From Worker Bee To Unflappable GC appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is the tendency for many law firms, especially Biglaw, to hope that technology — either its actual use, or (more often) a PR campaign pretending that it’s being used — will distract clients from deeper and more fundamental problems with the firm’s business model.

I divide the types of innovation in law, including technology, into two broad categories: additive innovation and subtractive innovation.

The first means trying to do more with more. In other words, hoping that some magical tool or new process can just be layered onto the existing model and solve your problems. Buy that shiny new software, and hopefully it’ll save your lawyers some time, and clients will be happy with the added value.

The latter means doing more with less. This is harder to implement, obviously, because it means making cuts. It means assessing all the costs of a law firm’s business model, and honestly asking yourself: is X or Y really needed to do what clients are really paying me to do?

Additive “innovation” lends itself to much sexier PR. But in my experience operating within the growing ecosystem of elite lean boutique law firms, subtractive innovation more often produces the results that clients actually want: materially lower rates without lower quality.

Fundamentally for a lot of clients complaining about the legal industry, “the rates are too damn high.” If your magical software that shaves off maybe 3–5% of billable time, while sometimes adding inflexibility into your processes, isn’t moving the needle on that problem, you’ve achieved very little.

If the real problem is simply that the rates are too damn high, the obvious next question is why, in fact, are they so high? The percentage of the rate actually paid to the lawyer doing the work is often a small fraction of the overall price. There are a number of possible responses to this question.

First, too high for whom? Very expensive large firms serve a variety of diverse clients. Not all of those clients complain the same about the rates. It is very possible — in fact, this is my opinion on the matter — that much of Biglaw has overshot the needs of, and therefore become overpriced for, many but not all of its clients.

Speaking only for the clients that really, truly think the rates are too damn high, the most material reasons that come to mind are:

1. extremely expensive offices designed to signal “Ferrari tier” branding;
2. too many disjointed practices under one roof that make it impossible to optimize for efficiency on a narrower, more aligned “menu” of practices; and – time to really bring some of the spice…
3. equity partners with extremely high profits per partner expectations that, while almost certainly brilliant and extremely hard working, simply aren’t needed to deliver the services that non-Ferrari clients actually want.

The subtractive innovation of newer, leaner law firm models executes on the above reality. Clients aren’t that impressed if you take a $1,000-per-hour lawyer and adopt some shiny software to shave 3% of their time. Take that same lawyer, and make their rate $550 or $600, without changing her compensation, and now you’ll have their attention.

Technology absolutely plays a role in this new kind of legal innovation, but that role is much more in the background. It’s not about asking lawyers to automate everything imaginable, even when clients often prefer flexibility. It’s also not about forcing all lawyers to work with a project manager, assistant project manager, billing specialist, alternative billing coordinator, and God knows who else 24/7.

All my love and respect to the software vendors and new nonlawyer legal professionals helping the $1,000- to $2,000-per-hour lawyers try to make their rates more palatable to clients. You are fighting a good fight.

But some of us have a different take on the matter. The real issue for many clients is, very simply, the rates are too damn high. Subtractive innovation is how we can lower them, without lowering the compensation of the lawyers actually delivering the goods on a day-to-day basis.

I say all of this not to poo-poo those trying to make Biglaw more efficient, including with new technology. Rather, sometimes there’s value in “zooming out” and looking at the bigger picture. Entrepreneurial lawyers today have a wide open field to try new business models for profitably delivering the services that even many high-end clients demand. As they explore those models, they should keep in mind that asking “What can I buy?” is often the wrong question. Sometimes the right question is: “What can I cut?”

José Ancer is a Partner and Chief Technology Officer at Optimal Counsel LLP, an elite, tech-enabled boutique law firm serving venture-backed startups and growth-stage companies for corporate & securities and M&A law. He frequently writes on his Startup and VC Law blog, Silicon Hills Lawyer, which is followed internationally by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lawyers, and law schools. Follow him on Twitter @ancerj.

The post Vaporware Technology Won’t Hide Your Firm’s Business Model Problems appeared first on Above The Law's Legal Tech Non-Event.

This made Wall Street very 🤬.

As decades passed, those folks eventually had to accept the SEC, but a new generation of finance bros have shaken off the strictures of Wall Street and moved to the crypto industry (which doesn’t have a “Street” as much as digital tokens denoting partial ownership of a road that doesn’t exist).

And they think they are very, very clever. Some of them had an idea: instead of promising a profit, maybe we can skirt the ENTIRE SECURITIES LAW REGIME by using some emojis instead!

Well done, you guys!

Judge Victor Marrero was less impressed with the argument that securities law withers in the face of pictograms. Without quoting Oliver Twist, the judge decided that if the law supposed that, the law is an ass.

In an ongoing class action alleging various securities law violations by the folks behind the Tweet above, Judge Marrero denied the motion to dismiss noting, inter alia, that those emojis have meaning. And that meaning may have implications for the outcome of the case.

Each Tweet promotes a recent sale or statistics of recent sales of Moments on the Marketplace. And although the literal word “profit” is not included in any of the Tweets, the “rocket ship” emoji, “stock chart” emoji, and “money bags” emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment.

Emojis can mean multiple things. I’ve already used the chocolate ice cream emoji and you definitely didn’t read it that way. But a money bag isn’t even coy! Seriously, you can’t avoid laws just by using pictures the same way you can avoid any semblance of actual value by using JPEGs.

This opinion has irritated the people you’d expect.

One Twitter user described the news as “tragic,” while another pointed out that freedom of speech no longer extends to emojis.

Yeah, that’s what happened. How do people this stupid survive? The act of inhaling has to tax the medulla oblongata more than understanding that fraudulent statements aren’t protected by the First Amendment.

Oscar Franklin Tan, the chief legal officer of NFT platform Enjin, also commented on the issue. Tan told Cointelegraph that the Dapper Labs decision should not create a “dangerous rule” that emojis make NFTs securities.” Tan explained that:

“Courts should protect the edgy, freewheeling messaging in NFT communities because shitposts and emojis are part of free speech too.”

According to Tan, sneaker resellers can also use the same “FOMO,” or “fear of missing out” pitch and use the emojis cited in the case.

I think a lot of bankers in the 1930s wanted the courts to protect “edgy, freewheeling messaging” too, but we decided against “privileging scam artists for the LOLs.” Sorry, I meant for the 😂. Honestly, the crypto world shifts between this nouveau-goldbug, libertarian “we will replace all world currency” messaging and “shitposting about monkey pictures is a core value” enough to give anyone whiplash.

Now, maybe there’s something to the argument that NFTs aren’t properly “securities” and maybe that gets the defendants out of this case. And even if they are securities, these specific emoji messages might not be fraudulent statements. But emojis are statements, even if they are used to convey implied meanings.

That shouldn’t be particularly controversial. Unless you’re a 🤡.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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