Benjamin Alarie and Abdi Aidid are legal experts who are heavily involved in the development of legal technology. They are releasing a new book, The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better later this year.
Benjamin Alarie is a tax law professor at the University of Toronto and has been in the tax law profession since 2004. He became interested in the future of legal education and how artificial intelligence will affect the profession, which led him to co-found Blue J, a legal technology company in Toronto. On the other hand, Abdi Aidid practiced as a commercial litigator in New York before becoming the Vice President of Legal Research at Blue J. He led the team of lawyers and research analysts and helped develop AI-informed predictive tools, which predict how future courts are likely to rule on new legal situations. Abdi is now a full-time law professor at the University of Toronto, teaching subjects like torts and civil procedure.
Naming the book "The Legal Singularity" is a big claim by the authors, so we asked them to explain what they meant by it. According to Abdi Aidid, the legal singularity is the practical elimination of legal uncertainty and its impact on our institutions and society. It is a future state where the law is unknowable in real time and on demand, and we can start doing things that we were not previously able to do because the law was either difficult to ascertain or we did not have a normative consensus around what the law ought to be. The concept of the legal singularity is related to the idea of a technological singularity, but it is not a totalizing event like the technological singularity. Instead, it is an equally socially important concept that focuses on how technological improvements affect the law and related institutions.
Alarie and Aidid suggest that the legal market needs to address bias in AI tools by keeping humans in the loop in arbitration and judicial contexts for a significant period of time. They believe that even as the legal singularity approaches and people begin to have confidence in algorithmic decision making, humans should still be involved in the process to audit machine-generated decisions. They argue that this is necessary because the law deals with deeply human questions, and there is more at stake than just ones and zeros. They believe that humans have to contribute to the legal system's notions of mercy, fairness, empathy, and procedural justice. They also suggest that involving humans in the process helps to inform the technology before disastrous consequences and helps to refine it. Therefore, they emphasize the need for human review of machine judgments, which will lead to accelerated learning in the law. Furthermore, they highlight that the legal market needs to distinguish between the kinds of problems that are a reflection of unaddressed social problems or those that are new technological problems. They stress that the legal market is still collectively responsible for resolving these issues.
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Transcript
Josh Kubicki and the Brainyacts Newsletter - Helping You Keep Up with the Advancements of Generative AI in the Legal Industry (TGIR Ep. 198)
The Future of AI within LexisNexis and the Legal Industry with Lexis CTO Jeff Reihl - TGIR Ep. 197
From Pain to Creativity: How AI Helped Kristina Kashtanova Illustrate Her "Zarya of the Dawn" Story - featuring Richmond Law's Ashley Dobbs and Roger Skalbeck (TGIR Ep. 196)
Revolutionizing Legal Technology Design with T&P Studios' Nicole Bradick (TGIR Ep. 195)
The Future of Fashion and the Law (TGIR Ep. 194)
Breaking Barriers: The Portia Project's MC Sungaila on the Unique Paths to Success for Women Lawyers and Judges (TGIR Ep. 192)
Johannes Scholtes: AI Is Finally Here. Now the Hard Work Begins for the Legal Industry (TGIR Ep. 191)
Colin Lachance on Jurisage's MyJr and How He's Looking at AI to Assist in the Synthesis and Reading of Legal Cases (TGIR Ep. 190)
The Bullshitter, The Searcher, and The Researcher - Damien Riehl on the Dynamic Shift in How the Legal Profession Will Leverage Standards and Artificial Intelligence
Successful Brand Awareness for Legal Professionals - Tips from Stefanie Marrone (TGIR Ep. 188)
The Secret Weapon: Leveraging Patent Agents to Gain a Competitive Edge - Shayne Phillips (TGIR Ep. 186)
The (ALMOST) Completely AI Generated Podcast (TGIR Ep. 186)
ChatGPT - If It Sounds Too Good To Be True... - Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle (TGIR Ep. 185)
Redgrave Data's Mollie Nichols on the De-Commoditizing of Data in the Legal Industry (TGIR Ep. 184)
APIs are the LEGO Building Blocks of Data - API Panel Discussion with Emily Rushing, Pam Noyd, Chris O'Connor, Keli Whitnell, and Erik Adams (TGIR Ep. 183)
Creating Actual Transparency Between Law Firms and Clients - Litify's Ari Treuhaft and Pam Wickersham
Nearly Two-Thirds of Legal Contracts are Gender-Biased and Why That Matters - Alex Denne and Caroline Hill (TGIR Ep. 181)
LinkSquares' Tim Parilla and Juliette Kopecky: These Aren't Legal Problems or Tech Problems, These Are Business Problems
The Mission: Eliminate Systemic Racism in the Legal System - LexisNexis' Ronda Bazley Moore (TGIR Ep. 179)
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