Welcome to Friday, LegalTech Friends and Founders! We hope you dig your first edition of “The STACK” brought to you by EvolveTheLaw in partnership with @QuantumJurist.
Lets bring you up to snuff on recent happenings over here at the Legal Innovation Center.
Last week, Nicole Black recapped Running With The Robots at LegalWeek 2018, noting this year’s conference demonstrated seriously renewed energy fueled by A.I. and a virtual brawl of sorts between CaseText’s CARA and Ross Intelligence’s EVA for best automated brief review. Nathan Wenzel, Founder and CEO of SimpleLegal, spoke to Mary Juetten about improving legal ops and billing on our member spotlight podcast. Zach Abramowitz also told us why he’s returning to law firms in 2018 and making a unique bet on #LegalTech.
EvolveLaw Members Featured as Legal AI Leaders in National Law Journal. The recent issue of The National Law Journal 2018 AI Leaders featured companies on the forefront of artificial intelligence in the law, and among those companies features were our very own EL members Casetext, Diligen, Docket Alarm, eBrevia, Intraspexion, Legal Robot, Litify, Nextlaw Labs, and Premonition! Go #LegalTech and #EvolveTheLaw.
Space Law! Today, launch into the interstellar legal system alongside Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy rockets and look to answer a question that has puzzled international law scholars for decades: who owns outer space? We see more law students (and private sector space privateers) caring about the founding “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” in the coming years. Source: Innovation & Tech Today.
Consent and Combating DeepFakes on Social Media. In other news, weirdly reminiscent of a “Black Mirror” episode, Twitter became the latest platform to ban the recent internet practice of “Deepfaking” (A.I. generated fake porn) on grounds that the illicit videos count as non-consenual intimate contact. This takes #MeToo to a whole new, virtualized level. Source: The Verge.
RoboCop coming to a Chinese city near your? WSJ also reported some new Black Mirror-esq technology news out of China this week. Chinese police are now showing off their latest surveillance tool as hundreds begin traveling for the Lunar New Year holiday: mobile facial-recognition units mounted on eyeglasses. I bet the NYPD would like to get their hands on those, as they roll out body-cam technology on the streets of NYC. Source: The Wall Street Journal.
Big Win for #LegalTech and #AccessToJustice! Speaking of new technology, and to end our inaugural STACK on a purely positive note, we were thrilled to learn of the 1st Dept.’s policy shift allowing lawyers and litigations arguing pro se to use laptops, tablets and smart phones during oral arguments. Allowing more technology for pro se litigations in our aged courthouses is one way to promote #AccessToJustice and #LegalTech. For this, we commend the 1st Dept. Source: New York Law Journal.
You are now up to snuff #LegalTech fans. Thanks for reading The STACK. Check back next week for more recap and news from the Legal Innovation Center.
