Lawyer Ex Machina #28: DoNotPassGo
AI
Will the war in Ukraine accelerate the development of fully autonomous drones for warfare, able to "identify, select and attack targets without help from humans"?
New York AG has warned the owner of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall that its use of facial recognition software, to bar individuals working for a law firm that's currently suing MSG from those venues, may run afoul of anti-bias laws
While not yet ready for a bar exam, ChatGPT has been put through its paces on four law school exams and earned a C+, according to these University of Minnesota Law School professors.
Meanwhile, an Advanced Legal Research class at University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School demoed ChatGPT and developed some takeaways on using it for legal research., including my favorite, a version of the Wikipedia rule for research ("it's okay to start your research there, but you should never finish your research there").
A bit has been going on with DoNotPay's Robot Lawyer:
Jan. 20th: DoNotPay's founder Joshua Browder announced that the company's AI would virtually, secretly represent someone in court on Feb 22, 2023.
Jan. 24th: Katheryn Tewson experiments with some of DoNotPay's services and does a write-up of what she receives (and doesn't receive), goes viral on the birdsite.
Jan. 25th: Browder announces that due to "threats from State Bar prosecutors," DoNotPay is postponing its court case and will be focusing on consumer-protection services.
Crypto
Genesis, a crypto lending firm, filed for bankruptcy last week, claiming $5.1 billion in liabilities.
Molly White, a critic of cryptocurrency and Web3, has an extensive annotation of Sam Bankman-Fried's blog post, "FTX Pre-Mortem Overview."
Legal industry
Casey Flaherty, founder of the Procertas platform for training lawyers on office technology, has a 2-part review of the legal market, focusing on legal departments and innovation. [Preview | Main essay]
Events
Legal Dive and ContractPodAi are presenting a virtual seminar on artificial intelligence and contract management for legal departments on February 28th, 2023. Learn more and register here.