The Ginger (Law) Librarian

As we are increasingly aware, the ethical Duty of Technology Competence requires lawyers to keep abreast of “changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology. ” To date, 35 states have adopted the duty . In a previous post , I highlighted  the risks of blindly relying on algorithmic results  (relevant technology) as a potential violation of the Duty of Technology Competence. We now have case law from Canada focusing on the benefits of using algorithmic results to perform legal research. In fact, this case law may be interpreted as requiring the use of algorithmic results when ethically performing legal research.  In both Cass v. 1410088 Ontario Inc. (“Cass”) and Drummond v. The Cadillac Fairview Corp. Ltd. (“Drummond”) justices of the Ontario Superior Court made comments about artificial intelligence and legal research. The Cass case was a slip and fall in which the defendant prevailed. The plaintiff, who ...

In 2009, a CNN article noted that the law is "at least five years behind technology as it is developing." In late 2016,  Aviv Ovadya was one of the first people to see that there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.” Ovadya saw early what many — including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs — wouldn’t grasp until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable — to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments — so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. Ovadya — now the chief technologist for the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Media Responsibility and a Knight News innovation fellow at the Tow Center for D...

Given the issues with the "Google Generation" and seeming ease of using algorithms in law, there are increasing challenges in using reasonable care to comply with the newer Duty of Technology Competence .  As noted in a previous post : The Duty of Technology Competence requires lawyers to keep abreast of “changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” To date, 28 states have adopted the duty. Using reasonable care to understand the benefits and risks associated with relevant technologies is increasingly difficult as society moves beyond the abundance of information that defined the Information Age to increasingly rely on algorithms that sort big data in the Algorithmic Society. However, reasonable care is essential when using algorithms in law. Take the COMPAS risk-assessment tool, for example. Developed by a private company called Equivant (formerly Northpointe), COMPAS—or the Correctional Offender Ma...

As we further consider how to train future lawyers for the Algorithmic Society and develop the quality of thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning that will define smartness in this new age, law schools must reach beyond their storied walls. In law, we must got beyond talking about algorithmic implications to actually help shape algorithmic performance. We need lawyers and programmers to work together to create a sound "machine learning corpus." There's potential for an entirely new subfield to emerge if given the right support. With many law school attached to major research universities, it's a great place to start this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary work. This type of interdisciplinary work would help to satisfy the career aspirations of advanced-degree seekers but also the wishes of many college presidents, deans, and faculty members who see an interdisciplinary professional education as a path to greater relevance, higher enroll...

Once in a while, I run across a website that speaks to why I became a librarian. This time that website was Girls at Library . About GAL : Girls At Library (GAL) is an online journal that features engaging literary interviews with and book recommendations from remarkable, diverse women who share a passion for reading. A unique online resource for literature lovers, GAL invites the exchange of ideas, perspectives, and emotions that underscore what makes reading such a universal pursuit. The books one reads both shape the mind and reflect the soul: literature empowers, transports, and inspires. To this end, GAL promotes reading as a constructive and enriching act for everyone. Each interview offers keen insights, personal portraits, and an artful, intimate look inside the libraries of women from all walks of life. The " There's a Book for That " link helps you find a book for any situation.  There's also a " Nightstand Series " link that as...

InsideHigherEd provided a comprehensive overview of recent actions by the American Bar Association (ABA) in what is seemingly a response to the long-standing criticism of legal education. As noted , earlier this month, the ABA’s accrediting arm recommended against approving the University of North Texas-Dallas College of Law, citing low admissions test scores scores of entering students. Days later, it found Ave Maria Law School in Florida out of compliance with its standards, again citing admissions practices. The ABA is also considering tightening bar-passage standards to make them tougher for schools to meet.  The long-standing criticism stems from the law school bubble  that was created during the recession. Law schools, like many other areas of higher education, saw increased enrollment during the recession. But the job market for law graduates has tightened in recent years. That’s meant more lawyers looking for work and fewer applications from prospective law studen...

IBM's Watson is being used in a variety of arenas to test AI in different capacities. We know that ROSS (a Watson progeny) is currently in development for legal research, and Watson has been used in medicine and cooking, for example. The WSJ is reporting that Watson , "Jill Watson" as it were, has been a TA in an online course at Georgia Tech since January 2016. “Jill,” as she was known to the artificial-intelligence class, had been helping graduate students design programs that allow computers to solve certain problems, like choosing an image to complete a logical sequence. And how exactly did "Jill" work? Last year, a team of Georgia Tech researchers began creating Ms. Watson by poring through nearly 40,000 postings on a discussion forum known as “Piazza” and training her to answer related questions based on prior responses. By late March, she began posting responses live. She answers only if she has a confidence rate of at least 97%. “She was the pers...

Cognitive computing is very close to reality in the legal research realm. Recently, BakerHostetler, an AMLaw100 firm, released a joint press release with ROSS Intelligence announcing a partnership. ROSS Intelligence is proud to announce that AmLaw100 law firm BakerHostetler has agreed to retain use of ROSS Intelligence's artificial intelligence legal research product, ROSS. The ROSS platform is built upon Watson, IBM's cognitive computer. With the support of Watson's cognitive computing and natural language processing capabilities, lawyers ask ROSS their research question in natural language, as they would a person, then ROSS reads through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns highly relevant, evidence-based candidate answers. ROSS also monitors the law around the clock to notify users of new court decisions that can affect a case. The program continually learns from the lawyers who use it to bring back better results each time. ROSS Intelligence...

Earlier this month, InsideHigherEd released news that Syracuse University announced plans to create a hybrid JD degree. The institution hopes the American Bar Association and New York State will accredit [the program]. The program will be launched in partnership with 2U Inc., which helps colleges take their academic programs online and already works with five other colleges at Syracuse. Students in the J.D. program would receive much of their instruction online but would also take some in-person courses and participate in externships, according to a news release from the university. Legal education has been slow to move online, as the ABA has taken a conservative stance in its approvals. In 2013 it gave William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School of Law) authority to create a part-time hybrid program. In 2012, 2U helped the law school at Washington University in St. Louis create a fully online master's degree in U.S. law. The law dean at WashU at the time, ...

A new article was just released that is the culmination of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace called  Lawyers at Work: A Study of the Reading, Writing, and Communication Practices of Legal Professionals by Ann Sinsheimer and David J. Herring. From the abstract: This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.  The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close reading and also reading broadly, skimming and...

The Findlaw Blog is reporting that [a]fter contentious debate, the delegates to the ABA's midyear meeting adopted a modest proposal to give states a framework for considering regulation of "nontraditional legal service providers." The debate over the proposal, Resolution 105 , was heated. Some delegates worried that it would take away business from attorneys who are already struggling. Others, that it would lead to the creation a lower tier of less-qualified legal providers, particularly for the poor. Opponents included the New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Nevada, and Texas bars, according to The American Lawyer, along with the ABA's litigation and solo and small firm sections. Backing the resolution were the South Carolina, Washington State, and San Francisco bars, along with the ABA's business law section. As noted, Resolution 105 is a fairly cautious step toward nonlawyer legal services. The resolution does not explicitly endorse nonlawyer legal se...

The Ginger Law Librarian has been following the Google Books case since 2013 - here , here , here , and here . It's culminated the point where is has finally landed in front of the highest court in the land. The Washington Post reported that the Authors Guild has officially asked the Supreme Court to hear its case against Google for its Google Books service. The group filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court on December 31, 2015. If you are not familiar with the suit, here's the gist: Google's free service allows users to search for particular lines or quotes in books through the company's main search engine, and also displays parts of scanned pages of books. The Authors Guild and Google have fought for 10 years over whether that qualifies as "fair use." The Authors Guild first complained in 2005 that this violates copyright and undermines the value of authors' work by providing their books online and for free.  The group has argued that Goo...

Our profession's resident awesome law librarian Sarah Glassmeyer is currently a fellow at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab, and she just released an important census of state legal information .  Why perform this census, you might ask? For a variety of reasons, as Glassmeyer points out : First of all, the United States is facing an access to justice crisis in its legal system.  A 2005 study by the Legal Services Corporation showed that 80% of the civil legal needs – legal needs in which there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to an attorney –  in the United States are going unmet.  The United States ranks 66th out of 98 countries in a ranking of access and affordability of civil legal services.  Individuals are relying on self-help resources, either provided by a library or the web. Secondly, due to the relative ease of web-based publishing, states are increasingly making the Internet the primary place of publication for their legal information m...

States have been reporting their (generally lower) bar pass rates from the July examination, and the debate about what is the cause and what should be done is intensifying. In that vein, the NYTimes Room for Debate asks, Is the Bar Too Law to Get Into Law School? Bar exam scores have declined over the past few years, and last summer, graduates had some of the lowest scores in a decade. This years scores could be even worse. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which creates and scores the multistate, multiple-choice portion of the exam, maintains that the quality of incoming law students has declined, while many law professors blame the bar exam itself. Why are so many law students failing the bar exam? A variety of debaters weighed in on the matter with advice to the ABA to create a more meaningful exam and law schools to better prepare their students. One debater noted that the incoming students have weaker credentials, and another opined that the bar exam should be dro...

The NYTimes recently ran a piece asking " What is the Point of College? " The author put college in two categories: utility university and utopia university. One vision focuses on how college can be useful — to its graduates, to employers and to a globally competitive America. When presidential candidates talk about making college more affordable, they often mention those benefits, and they measure them largely in dollars and cents. How is it helping postgraduate earnings, or increasing G.D.P.? As college grows more expensive, plenty of people want to know whether they’re getting a good return on their investment. They believe in Utility U. Another vision of college centers on what John Stuart Mill called ‘‘experiments in living,’’ aimed at getting students ready for life as free men and women. Here, college is about building your soul as much as your skills. Students want to think critically about the values that guide them, and they will inevitably want to test out thei...

The NYTimes published an article today called Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs . It's the same critique that we've been hearing for awhile now. This time the onus was to stop allowing federal student aid to freely flow to law schools - especially the schools at the bottom where the graduates have the worst job prospects. Okay, okay, I understand the idea that if we squeeze the purse strings, the schools will finally be forced to do something.  However, this will have a deleterious effect on diversity in an already fairly homogenous profession. The schools at the bottom are some of the most diverse in the country. And that's not an accident as minorities and low-income students generally lag in being afforded the same resources that (again generally) allow someone to attend a top school - things like not having to work while in undergrad so they can solely focus on grades or not being able to take an LSAT prep course, etc.... We know that legal education ...

Not only are law librarians at risk for automation , it appears that attorneys are also in the mix as some jurisdictions and companies are using software to help resolve personal injury claims, tax disputes, traffic tickets and divorce issues. One company, Modria, is branching out after developing software to help eBay and PayPal solve customer complaints, the Associated Press reports. Modria’s software is now used in several jurisdictions to help resolve appeals of property tax assessments. Its software is also being used by an arbitration association to resolve medical claims in some types of car crashes, and in the Netherlands to help couples going through a divorce. The divorce software asks couples questions about their children and whether they want to co-parent. Areas of agreement are noted, and suggested values for spousal support are suggested. Areas of disagreement are negotiated, resulting in divorce papers that can be printed and reviewed by lawyers. In addition to the...

Salon recently posted a fairly comprehensive article discussing the generally universal recommended reforms to legal education. From the article: Almost thirty years ago, the New York Times ran a Sunday magazine feature titled, “The Trouble with America’s Law Schools.” The piece highlighted many of the curricular concerns common today, particularly the lack of practical training, the inattention to issues of professional responsibility, and the disengagement of upper-level law students. And as noted, we're still dealing with many of the same issues today. Here are some of the highlights from the recommended reforms: Finances: Schools also need to look for more ways to cut costs and to diversify their revenue streams. More programs for nonlawyers, undergraduates, practicing attorneys, and foreign graduate students are obvious options. Debt burdens for students could also be reduced by allowing them to attend after three years of college, as a few law schools now do. Stru...

The first seven people have passed the exam in Washington to become the country's first legal technicians. The ABA Journal reported on this trend in January. The legal technicians will be licensed by the state to provide legal advice and assistance to clients in certain areas of law without the supervision of a lawyer. The first practice area in which LLLTs will be licensed is domestic relations. "So far, Washington stands alone in formally licensing nonlawyers to provide legal services. But California is actively considering nonlawyer licensing, and several other states are beginning to explore it. New York has sidestepped licensing and is already allowing nonlawyers to provide legal assistance in limited circumstances while also looking to expand their use." As for the practicalities, the legal technicians "will be free to set their own fees and work independently of lawyers, even opening their own offices. The laws of attorney-client privilege and of a law...

It feels like we are on the cusp of a real revolution in JD programs offering online options. Law schools first started dabbling in online LL.M. programs because LL.M. programs are outside of the auspices of ABA oversight and do not have to comply with the ABA limit dealing with online hours. But that limit seems to be loosening. In January 2015, William Mitchell started the first hybrid JD program that the ABA conceptually approved in 2013 . From WM's website : Each semester has a clear and carefully designed curricular focus. Students spend 11 or 12 weeks a semester completing online coursework that culminates in a week-long, on-campus Capstone week focused on experiential learning. This new hybrid-degree program requires only 2 weeks on campus for the academic year. It is, in effect, an online, ABA-approved JD degree. At this point, it's either move forward with the trend or get left behind. Law school, in its current form, is well suited for online education. ...