Wevorce, a Y Combinator (the non plus ultra of startup accelerators) alumn developing legal technology for divorces (WSJ). For what it’s worth, I believe it has possible to file for (amicable) divorce electronically in some states of Australia for several years now.
Modus Is Trying to Shake Up the Fat eDiscovery Industry (TechCrunch)
Start-Up Looks to Make Law Firm Billing More Transparent (NYT DealBook)
Legal Tech Start-up Showcase starring LegalForce and Wevorce held at Stanford CodeX Apr 3, video available on YouTube
Previous editions:
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
Intelligent legal technology in Finnish courts by 2025?
In Finland, the select committee on judicial reform presented its report to the Minister of Justice today. (Press release in Finnish, Swedish.) The report, responding to the political pressure of making reducing judicial expenditures by 2025 while at the same time making trials more expedient (Finland has quite a track record from the ECHR in this respect), contains a fair share of controversially controversial recommendations and proposals, including the total elimination of lay judges and possibly even the two-track system of general and administrative courts throughout the system, but then there is also this:
The general sad state of court ICT in Finland was also highlighted by the Minister in her reply and also raised earlier independently in a short interview with her in Hufvudstadsbladet a week or two ago. The Finnish intelligent legal technology lobby (ahem) is officially pleased.
(If this is your first encounter with the words “intelligent legal technology”, you may want to take a look at this article of mine from the latest IPRinfo magazine.)
In some types of cases the preparation processcould be more strongly computer-supported. For example, when the elements of certain crimes are met, the system could automatically offer relevant phrasings as motivations, which could ease up the burden of processing simple high-volume cases, such as drunk driving. This could reduce routine work while at the same time safeguarding the high quality of the decisions.
(Finnish original: Osassa asioita voidaan valmistelua tukea tietojärjestelmän avulla nykyistä voimakkaammin. Esimerkiksi tiettyjen tunnusmerkistöjen täyttyessä tietojärjestelmä voisi automaattisesti tarjota asiaan liittyviä fraasiperusteluja, mikä voisi keventää suuren volyymin yksinkertaisten juttujen, kuten rattijuopumukset, käsittelyä. Näin voitaisiin vähentää rutiiniluontoista työtä ja samalla kuitenkin varmistaa päätösten korkea laatu. (p. 18))
The general sad state of court ICT in Finland was also highlighted by the Minister in her reply and also raised earlier independently in a short interview with her in Hufvudstadsbladet a week or two ago. The Finnish intelligent legal technology lobby (ahem) is officially pleased.
(If this is your first encounter with the words “intelligent legal technology”, you may want to take a look at this article of mine from the latest IPRinfo magazine.)
Monday, 4 March 2013
Legal startup news (March 2013)
Starting close to home: Onomatics products are now branded TrademarkNow, coinciding with the release of two new products: NameRank and NameCheck
A legal startup especially for startups: YC-backed Clerky Helps Startups Save Time And Money On Legal Incorporation, Stock Issuance Forms And More (TechCrunch)
How Alan Dershowitz And Two Entrepreneurs Will Disrupt Billable Hours (Fast Company)
Competitions, competitions... Law as an App at the University of Stockholm. (Maybe we’ll have one in Helsinki some day as well — maybe 2025...) Results and report
Is this the first legal startup in the world’s most prestigious accelerator? Lawdingo, The Startup That Lets You Talk To Lawyers Instantly, Joins Y Combinator (TechCrunch)
Ex-Googlers Launch Sift Science, A Fraud-Fighting System For Websites, Backed By $5.5M In Funding From Union Square, First Round, YC & Others (TechCrunch)
Iron Tech II coming up April 17 (Neota Logic)
I’ll try to keep up with these as a recurring feature with a new post for each month, updated over the course of the month. All pointers most welcome. Previous edition:
A legal startup especially for startups: YC-backed Clerky Helps Startups Save Time And Money On Legal Incorporation, Stock Issuance Forms And More (TechCrunch)
How Alan Dershowitz And Two Entrepreneurs Will Disrupt Billable Hours (Fast Company)
Competitions, competitions... Law as an App at the University of Stockholm. (Maybe we’ll have one in Helsinki some day as well — maybe 2025...) Results and report
Is this the first legal startup in the world’s most prestigious accelerator? Lawdingo, The Startup That Lets You Talk To Lawyers Instantly, Joins Y Combinator (TechCrunch)
Ex-Googlers Launch Sift Science, A Fraud-Fighting System For Websites, Backed By $5.5M In Funding From Union Square, First Round, YC & Others (TechCrunch)
Iron Tech II coming up April 17 (Neota Logic)
I’ll try to keep up with these as a recurring feature with a new post for each month, updated over the course of the month. All pointers most welcome. Previous edition:
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
Legal startup news (February 2013)
Online dispute resolution for real: Ebay Spinoff Modria Is Judge Judy For Cyber Shoppers (Fast Company)
Case factor analysis for real: Judicata Raises $2M From Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois And Others To Give Lawyers Better Research And Analytics Tools (TechCrunch)
How To Run A Law Firm Like A Startup (Business Insider via Computational Legal Studies)
LegalForce Store Offers Walk-in Lawyer Access in Palo Alto (eLawyering Blog) (BTW, there has been something a bit similar called the Legal Lounge for a while now here in Helsinki as well.)
Pitchpitchpitch! ReInvent Law are arranging a pitch competition next week. An excellent initiative and the first one specifically for legal startups I've heard about. As a cynical old person who has hung around young and innovative startupsters a lot last year at the Startup Sauna I would just like to warn that while pitching is fine and useful for early-stage companies, it is easy to overdo and just keep pitchpitchpitching instead of working on the product. (Oh, and Onomatics got seed funding without even presenting the pitch deck. Neener neener.)
Results of said competition @ReneeKnake: @ReInventLaw StartUP Competition winners! Best overall LoquiTab Runner up @Kat_Hennessy RiskADvantage Most creative @A_Ninhja p(AR)adigmLaw
Case factor analysis for real: Judicata Raises $2M From Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois And Others To Give Lawyers Better Research And Analytics Tools (TechCrunch)
How To Run A Law Firm Like A Startup (Business Insider via Computational Legal Studies)
LegalForce Store Offers Walk-in Lawyer Access in Palo Alto (eLawyering Blog) (BTW, there has been something a bit similar called the Legal Lounge for a while now here in Helsinki as well.)
Pitchpitchpitch! ReInvent Law are arranging a pitch competition next week. An excellent initiative and the first one specifically for legal startups I've heard about. As a cynical old person who has hung around young and innovative startupsters a lot last year at the Startup Sauna I would just like to warn that while pitching is fine and useful for early-stage companies, it is easy to overdo and just keep pitchpitchpitching instead of working on the product. (Oh, and Onomatics got seed funding without even presenting the pitch deck. Neener neener.)
Results of said competition @ReneeKnake: @ReInventLaw StartUP Competition winners! Best overall LoquiTab Runner up @Kat_Hennessy RiskADvantage Most creative @A_Ninhja p(AR)adigmLaw
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Translation Technology and Copyright
Translation technology (TT) has made significant technical advances over the past decade. Machine translation has become increasingly commonplace in everyday use through services such as Google Translate. At the same time, computer-aided translation systems are now an invaluable tool for the professional translator. Unlike the machine translation systems of yore, current systems are no longer based on explicit, formal models of language, but rather on machine learning and statistical methods using vast collections of multilingual documents with each language element aligned across language pairs. Because of this, entirely new questions of intellectual property become a crucial yet still poorly understood part of the enterprise. This article presents an introduction to translation technology and the legal questions potentially involved and then proceeds to the legal analysis of quantitative and qualitative requirements for copyright protection, the issue of potential (human and computer) authorship to translation technology output, and others.
Our article can be found here:
Sorry for the paywall. Our article has not undergone any language examination. According to the editors each text “shall be the voice of its author”.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Prompted by the discussion at a presentation I gave yesterday on intelligent legal technology (titlend Älykäs oikeusteknologia, ie. in Finnish, for once) I guess I feel the need to export a part of the neural network that subsequently emerged in the form of a blog post. I was asked to define artificial intelligence, and since I refused to provide a definition, I was asked again. And again. So even if providing such a definition is quite irrelevant as I don’t research legal AI in general (in which case the delineation between AI and non-AI might be of interest) but rather some specific questions (modelling vagueness and uncertainty in law) which without a question are AI & law questions, here, for explanatory rather than definitive use, with no warranties for fitness for any particular purpose, yadda yadda yadda, are my two cents:
Artificial Intelligence is the cross-disciplinary enterprise of trying to do things with a computer which when done by people are said to require intelligence and which computers cannot (yet) do. (The careful reader may notice a certain degree of isomorphism with a popular definition within the extended cognition framework...)
(And comparison shoppers, here is Wikipedia’s current version: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and robots and the branch of computer science that aims to create it.”)
So: Consistently with the bottom-up approach to AI I like to advocate in general, I don’t think allusions to the Turing test or the Singularity or whatever are all that interesting, as far as actual progress is concerned, the cognitive arts advance through innovations which are very small increments from the perspective of AI as a whole but can be quite dramatic for the topical discipline in question.
I do think that the trying (or aim[ing] to create) is an important part of what makes AI AI. Doing arithmetics also requires intelligence but has never been a part of AI since computers could do (and indeed were built to do) it properly from the beginning. And so on the way from notrespondingstilltrying to commercial viability, AI projects start being called computational whatever or whatever technology (hence legal technology). Of course the boundaries are vague and the whole boxological excercise of little use in anything other than turf-wars in academia.
And the fact that the definition refers to human intelligence just serves to illustrate the futility and question-beggitude of definitions for one simple reason: The psychological understanding of human intelligence just adds even more layers of complexity. For example, IQ tests cannot possibly measure human intelligence per se and in general. What they measure instead is a specific indicator known as the g factor (or general intelligence), which has been shown to correlate (reasonably) well with the more specific intelligent abilities.
Even if working on definitions can occasionally serve an useful purpose, personally I think in most cases the more expedient alternative is to follow Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I know it when I see it.” For historical reasons, jurisprudence in Finland still has a particular affinity for concepts and definitions not really seen elsewhere to the same degree. I’m planning to address this issue in extenso at some point with the title Begriffsjurisprudenz 2.0. (Spoiler alert: may also offend ontologists.)
Artificial Intelligence is the cross-disciplinary enterprise of trying to do things with a computer which when done by people are said to require intelligence and which computers cannot (yet) do. (The careful reader may notice a certain degree of isomorphism with a popular definition within the extended cognition framework...)
(And comparison shoppers, here is Wikipedia’s current version: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and robots and the branch of computer science that aims to create it.”)
So: Consistently with the bottom-up approach to AI I like to advocate in general, I don’t think allusions to the Turing test or the Singularity or whatever are all that interesting, as far as actual progress is concerned, the cognitive arts advance through innovations which are very small increments from the perspective of AI as a whole but can be quite dramatic for the topical discipline in question.
I do think that the trying (or aim[ing] to create) is an important part of what makes AI AI. Doing arithmetics also requires intelligence but has never been a part of AI since computers could do (and indeed were built to do) it properly from the beginning. And so on the way from notrespondingstilltrying to commercial viability, AI projects start being called computational whatever or whatever technology (hence legal technology). Of course the boundaries are vague and the whole boxological excercise of little use in anything other than turf-wars in academia.
And the fact that the definition refers to human intelligence just serves to illustrate the futility and question-beggitude of definitions for one simple reason: The psychological understanding of human intelligence just adds even more layers of complexity. For example, IQ tests cannot possibly measure human intelligence per se and in general. What they measure instead is a specific indicator known as the g factor (or general intelligence), which has been shown to correlate (reasonably) well with the more specific intelligent abilities.
Even if working on definitions can occasionally serve an useful purpose, personally I think in most cases the more expedient alternative is to follow Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio: “I know it when I see it.” For historical reasons, jurisprudence in Finland still has a particular affinity for concepts and definitions not really seen elsewhere to the same degree. I’m planning to address this issue in extenso at some point with the title Begriffsjurisprudenz 2.0. (Spoiler alert: may also offend ontologists.)
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Peter Thiel on Singularity and legal technology
Betabeat (just one of many tech blogs I follow regularly) had yesterday a interesting post on Peter Thiel’s (Stanford Law graduate, PayPal co-founder &c &c) presentation at the Legal Technology and Informatics course held at Stanford law for the first time this past autumn. Blake Winters has kindly written and published an essay on the presentation, on which these brief comments are based.
Personally I think all this talk about the Singularity is mostly just a distraction (and of course fodder for dystopic science fiction). Actually functioning general-purpose artificial intelligence is not simply just a matter of bytes and CPU cycles or even fully replicating the neural network of a human brain at some instant (because so much of human intelligence depends on neurogenesis and the formation and pruning of connections, processes which only a couple of decades ago were still thought to end by adulthood), and anyway it is so far in the horizon that it is impossible to use as a target. There is still a lot of work to be done in trying to make sense about the actual functioning of human cognition. (The discussion about free will and whether Libet’s experiments show that it doesn’t exist is a good example.) Even if the Singularity does arrive at some point, the interaction of humans and computers at that time will not be something we can easily imagine. (Just compare whatever you are using to read this with a completely character-based interface (your only choice thirty years ago). And I still fondly remember the sound of a good mechanical teleprinter...)
To date, AI has been most successful when trying to solve very difficult but still quite concrete problems with computational methods. My rule of thumb is that when AI starts being useful, it stops being called AI. (Hence I also prefer to talk about (intelligent) legal technology rather than legal AI.) There are many branches of computer science and other computational sciences which started out basic AI research, with language technology as just one good example.
But more importantly, as for the shorter timeframe, I totally agree with Thiel. Computers are much better than people at some tasks and legal technology has great potential for radically transforming the marketplace for legal services (for the better) in the near future. The work we do at Onomatics will hopefully a good example from the more technologically advanced end of the scale, but our domain (trademark law) is just a very small corner of the entire legal system.
All this just reminds me that I should finally get around to writing two blog posts I’ve been thinking about for quite a while, one titled “Why do computers make better lawyers than people” and the other – of course – “Why do people make better lawyers than computers”. Real Soon Now!
Further reading:
Personally I think all this talk about the Singularity is mostly just a distraction (and of course fodder for dystopic science fiction). Actually functioning general-purpose artificial intelligence is not simply just a matter of bytes and CPU cycles or even fully replicating the neural network of a human brain at some instant (because so much of human intelligence depends on neurogenesis and the formation and pruning of connections, processes which only a couple of decades ago were still thought to end by adulthood), and anyway it is so far in the horizon that it is impossible to use as a target. There is still a lot of work to be done in trying to make sense about the actual functioning of human cognition. (The discussion about free will and whether Libet’s experiments show that it doesn’t exist is a good example.) Even if the Singularity does arrive at some point, the interaction of humans and computers at that time will not be something we can easily imagine. (Just compare whatever you are using to read this with a completely character-based interface (your only choice thirty years ago). And I still fondly remember the sound of a good mechanical teleprinter...)
To date, AI has been most successful when trying to solve very difficult but still quite concrete problems with computational methods. My rule of thumb is that when AI starts being useful, it stops being called AI. (Hence I also prefer to talk about (intelligent) legal technology rather than legal AI.) There are many branches of computer science and other computational sciences which started out basic AI research, with language technology as just one good example.
But more importantly, as for the shorter timeframe, I totally agree with Thiel. Computers are much better than people at some tasks and legal technology has great potential for radically transforming the marketplace for legal services (for the better) in the near future. The work we do at Onomatics will hopefully a good example from the more technologically advanced end of the scale, but our domain (trademark law) is just a very small corner of the entire legal system.
All this just reminds me that I should finally get around to writing two blog posts I’ve been thinking about for quite a while, one titled “Why do computers make better lawyers than people” and the other – of course – “Why do people make better lawyers than computers”. Real Soon Now!
Further reading:
- Peter Thiel on The Future of Legal Technology - Notes Essay (by Blake Masters)
- Notes from Peter Thiel’s CS183 Startup class at Stanford (by Blake Masters)
- Syllabus for the Stanford Legal Technology and Informatics course
- Course reader for the same
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