The Legal Tech Institute at the Harris County Law Library has released a new video CLE. Fulfilling Ethical Obligations with Legal Research is the latest additional to our Learn On-Demand CLE library that lets you earn CLE credit in Texas while staying up to date on legal tech. Visit the Law Library's Legal Tech Institute page for more legal tech learning opportunities.
Robot Justice
In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, AI Artificial Intelligence, scientists program a robotic boy to understand and express a full range of human emotions, including love. The boy is adopted into a family as a test case where he learns to connect with the couple who become his parents. After a series of unexpected events, the family’s living arrangement becomes unsustainable. The mother begins to fear the boy and abandons him in the woods, consigning him to an uncertain fate. The boys sets out to navigate a complex world where he’s neither fully human nor fully machine.
Fast forward thousands of years to a time when alien life forms have arrived on planet Earth. Here, they discover the body of the robotic boy at the bottom of a frozen river and seek to reverse engineer his design. This quasi-human creation is their only connection to the Earthling inhabitants who preceded them, and they wish to understand his emotions. He was programmed by humans, they reason, so traces of their humanness still exist within his code.
In addition to film’s impressive special effects, its evocative music, and the spectrum of feelings it inspires, this movie also teaches a lesson: software bears the marks of the people who write the code. All of the assumptions, biases, and predetermined social perspectives that we possess get baked in to the algorithms, creating smart machines that lack the objectivity we expect them to exhibit. They inherit our prejudices and act accordingly. Nowhere is this being discussed more widely, it seems, than in the application of AI to the law. The articles listed here, found in popular magazines and journals, describe various ways that AI is being used — and misused — to predict crime, sentence offenders, and determine the likelihood of criminal recidivism. They also explore the limits of AI, the ethics of using AI to mete out justice, and the regulations that some are proposing to counteract the harmful effects of machine bias.
Artificial Intelligence is Now Used to Predict Crime. But is it Biased? (Smithsonian)
Can Crime Be Predicted by an Algorithm? from Hello World by Hannah Fry (Penguin)
Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair (Nature)
Machine Bias: Risk Assessments in Criminal Sentencing (ProPublica)
We Need an FDA for Algorithms (Nautilus)
AI Research is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog (Wired)
One State’s Bail Reform Exposes the Promise and Pitfalls of Tech-Driven Justice (Wired)
Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals. That Must Stop Now. (Wired)
Management AI: Bias, Criminal Recidivism, And the Promise of Machine Learning (Forbes)
Trust but Verify: A Guide to Algorithms and the Law (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology)
[VIDEO] The Truth About Algorithms (Aeon)
Legal Podcast Round-Up
According to this infographic from Concordia University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a podcast explosion is upon us. Podcasts are a cultural phenomenon that started gaining serious momentum in 2014 with the first season of Serial, a multi-part work of investigative journalism that achieved cult status among audiophiles and true crime fans alike.
The number and variety of podcasts now available is staggering, and the listening options for podcast fans is only continuing to grow. Legal podcasts are among some of the most popular, in part because they often touch on political topics, as well a criminal and social justice issues, which, in all areas of infotainment, including television docuseries and published investigative journalism, are very well-liked by not only the legal community, but the public in general.
A few of the currently most popular law-related podcasts are listed here:
RBG: Beyond Notorious - SCOTUS, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law - Constitutional Law, POTUS
We the People - Constitutional Law, Federal Government
More Perfect - Constitutional Law, SCOTUS
Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) - Constitutional Law, SCOTUS, Federal Government
The Life of the Law - Investigative Reporting
Legal Wars - Famous Courtroom Battles
Criminal Injustice - Criminal Justice
Constitutional (Washington Post)
Sworn - Criminal Justice
Caught - Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice
How To Master Microsoft Excel
Excel is a data management tool used for organizing, calculating, graphing, and sharing tabular information. The importance of developing proficiency in the use of Excel cannot be overstated. Knowing how to manipulate spreadsheets is just as important as properly formatting a written document.
According to some, we spend 10% of our working lives manipulating spreadsheets, so becoming adept at using Excel can only improve your efficiency and productivity. Several resources are available to those interested in developing Excel proficiency.
For starters, we recommend that you visit our On-Demand Learning page from the Legal Tech Institute where you will find a recorded CLE called Excel Essentials for the Practice of Law, presented by none other than Ben Kusmin, the go-to expert on using Excel for legal work. Visit his website, Excel Esquire, for even more helpful tips and information.
Secondly, we recommend that you download The Definitive 100 Most Useful Excel Tips, an outstanding resource guide that includes, along with each tip, a utility score, a difficulty scale, an estimated learning time, and a suggestion for how to apply each skill practically.
If tackling 100 new skills seems a bit daunting, try a more gradual approach. Tackle just 10 Excel Functions Everyone Should Know, presented by Harvard Business Review.
Certainly, there is a wealth of additional resources you may consult, but the suggestions provided here are a great place to start. Look for our Legal Tech Institute to offer a Hands-on Legal Tech Training course, Excel for Legal Work, in the new year. Hope to see you there!
Need even more inspiration to become an Excel master? Check out this competition for expert Excel users, the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship, where a new Excel spreadsheet champion is crowned every year. Alternatively, consider the work of this incredible artist, who “paints” Japanese landscapes using Excel. Spreadsheets aren’t just for number crunchers any more!
Public Interest Technology and the law
Photo via: https://www.goodfreephotos.com
Disruptive innovation, content curation and design thinking are buzzworthy terms that, despite their possible overuse, describe substantive and meaningful concepts with broad application across many disciplines. Design thinking, the application of design principles to solve problems, is being applied in a variety of fields, including business and industry, healthcare, education, and the law.
IDEO, a global design firm based on Palo Alto, is often credited as the architect of design thinking, and David Kelley, IDEO’s founder, is, not surprisingly, a strong advocate for this inventive problem-solving method. Along with his brother Tom (IDEO’s marketing manager), David Kelley has built a creativity engine that generates some of the most innovative ways of solving problems from the everyday to the exceptional. The brothers also write and speak about creativity and innovation in hopes of inspiring others to use design principles in their personal and professional endeavors.
One of their titles in particular, The Ten Faces of Innovation (written by Tom Kelley), resonates with many who work in law, tech, or at the intersections of these two fields as, increasingly, every lawyer must. Mr. Kelley discusses in some detail the different roles that each person on a team might play and the contributions that each member of a working group might bring to a problem-solving effort. One of those critical roles is that of the cross-pollinator, the person who “draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts to break new ground,” precisely the kind of thinking that’s required in the burgeoning field of public interest technology, a new and rapidly evolving area of practice that allows trained technologists to leverage their knowledge and skills for the benefit of the social good.
By combining tech expertise with fields such as public service, healthcare, criminal justice, education, immigration, child welfare, and the law, cross-pollinators are the perfect kinds of people to work in public interest tech.
To learn more about public interest tech, visit these sites:
Public interest Tech: A Growing Field You Should Know (Ford Foundation)
Public Interest Technology: About (New America)
Serving Up Technology in the Public’s Interest — Hard But Worth It (Mashable)
Navigating Complexity in Pursuit of Public Interest Technology (Blue Ridge Labs)
Building our Technology Policy Future (Alan Davidson for Medium.com)
Why Universities Need ‘Public Interest Technology’ Courses (Wired)
Navigating the Field of Civic Tech (Derek Poppert for Medium.com)
Also, because it’s voting season, we call your attention to these public interest/civic tech initiatives that are designed to increase turn-out at the polls and ensure a fair and accessible voting experience for all of the electorate: