Grand Reopening

Law and AI returns today with a vengeance.  Today’s post has two purposes: (1) to let you know about some recent developments in my AI-related professional life; and more importantly, (2) to introduce you to Law and AI’s second contributing author, Joe Wilbert.

I’ll tackle the second item first.  Joe and I were classmates and friends in law school.  He was Lead Articles Editor while I was Editor-in-Chief of The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics.  Joe served as a federal judicial clerk after graduation, worked in private practice for several years, and eventually took on an interest in the intersection between law and artificial intelligence.  He now heads up a stealth-mode startup where he is developing legal technology that uses machine learning and natural language processing to improve several aspects of litigation.  You can read more about Joe’s background on the About page.

As it happens, Joe and I have both worked over the past couple years to teach ourselves about the technical side of AI through online courses and self-study.  Joe’s focus has been on the programming side while mine has been on mathematics and statistical modeling, but both of us share the goal of gaining a deeper understanding of the subject matter we write about.  Increasingly, we both are applying our self-education in our day jobs–Joe full-time through his start-up, and me through my steadily building work with Littler’s data analytics and Robotics and AI practice groups.  Together, we will bring complementary perspectives on the increasingly busy intersection between AI and law.

Turning to a couple other developments in my work on law and AI, I’ve spent much of the past several months working with Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute on an initiative to help employers and workers manage the labor-market disruptions that AI and other automation technologies are likely to bring in the coming years.  You can read our report–“The Future is Now: Workforce Opportunities and The Coming TIDE”–here.  TIDE means “technology-induced displacement of employees,” the term that Littler uses to refer to the millions of workers who an increasing number of studies warn will be forced to switch occupational categories in the coming years due to automation.

I also just posted a new law review article on SSRN, inspired by (and often borrowing from) several posts on this blog addressing the issue of the legal status of autonomous systems, including the possibility of AI personhood (spoiler alert: bad idea).

The pace of new blog posts will pick up a bit from hereon out.  The goal is for Law and AI to have at least 1 new blog post per month going forward, and hopefully more.  Stay tuned.