Extract from Doug Austin’s article “The Ethics of AI in The Legal Profession”
The final installment of the virtual Legalweek(year) just concluded, with the fifth installment having completed this week, after previous iterations in February (the traditional time of year for in-person Legalweek), March, April, and May. I attended a handful of sessions and planned to give you a sampling of the sessions I attended, but the session that I attended at the end of the conference on Wednesday was so good, I decided to cover it specifically.
The session was The Ethics of AI in The Legal Profession and it was conducted by Tess Blair of Morgan Lewis and Maura R. Grossman of the University of Waterloo and Maura Grossman Law (who should be a familiar name to any of you who understand Technology Assisted Review (TAR) as she and Gordon V. Cormack defined the term and issued the groundbreaking study that demonstrated how TAR could be more efficient and effective for document review).
Blair and Grossman covered several aspects of the use of AI, a couple of which I will briefly recap here. They also provided some interesting graphics to illustrate various concepts such as machine learning (interspersed pictures of chihuahuas and blueberry muffins so similar it’s startling), natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning.
