Lawyer Ex Machina #26: Robo-lawyers in traffic court
AI
Is the end-game in legal research AI to replace treatises? Is this a question only a librarian would ask?
— Rebecca Fordon (@theFordon) January 11, 2023
DoNotPay, an AI legal self-help app that helps user contest parking tickets and user fees, is planning to assist two defendants in traffic court next month by providing arguments developed in real-time by an open source AI language model, similar to GPT-3. [Politico | CBS News | SF Standard]
A Georgia man was arrested and held for a week after being identified via a facial recognition program as aiding in a theft in New Orleans, despite "clear physical differences" between the man and the perpetrator seen on surveillance footage and that the man arrested claims to have never been in the state of Louisiana. [NOLA.com]
ChatGPT is already being used by malicious hackers to write malware and encryption tools for ransomware.
Miscellaneous
According to Forbes, Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that rivaled FTX, has lost 24% of its assets, $12 billion, in investor withdrawals.
Last year, the ACLU and the South Carolina NAACP sued the judiciary of South Carolina over its ban against scraping data from the state's online repository of legal filings. This week, the federal judge denied defendants' motion to dismiss. [Docket]
Law librarian blog Dewey B Strategic has several key takeaways from the new State of the Legal Market report, compiled by Georgetown Law and Thomson Reuters, the biggest being that falling demand and productivity, with increasing expenses and inflation, will make 2023 a "challenging year" for many firms. [Report download via form]
"3 tangible ways to ensure low-income Americans get the legal help they need" [Fast Company]
Gavelytics, a "pioneering state litigation analytics company" that ceased operations last year, has been acquired by a predictive analytics start-up called Pre/Dicta.
Events
Harvard Prof. Jonathan Zittrain and Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Just Great, are having a 'fireside chat' on cyptocurrencies and the future of the Internet; tomorrow - 9:30 - 10:30 a.m. Pacific time