In the future, is it conceivable that a firm would be charged with legal malpractice if they didn't use artificial intelligence (AI)? Today, artificial intelligence offers a solution to solve or at least make the access-to-justice issue better and completely transform our traditional legal system. Here's what you need to know about how AI, big data, and online courts will change the legal system. When I sat down in conversation with Richard Susskind, OBE, the world's most-cited author on the future of legal services, to discuss the future of law and lawyers, it became apparent just how much change the legal system will face over the next decade thanks to innovation brought about by artificial intelligence and big data. In Richard's book The Future of Law, published in 1996, he predicted that in the future, lawyers and clients would communicate via email.

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe to our blog and follow SimpleLegal and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates! Corporate Counsel magazine reporters spoke to several general counsel about what they say will impact their work and the legal industry. From outside counsel merging with other law firms to the use of artificial intelligence to keep down legal department costs, this article outlines some of the trends in-house counsel may find themselves dealing with in the new year.

The European Commission is considering measures to impose a temporary ban on facial recognition technologies used by both public and private actors, according to a draft white paper on Artificial Intelligence obtained by EURACTIV. If implemented, the plans could throw current AI projects off course in some EU countries, including Germany's wish to roll out automatic facial recognition at 134 railway stations and 14 airports. France also has plans to establish a legal framework permitting video surveillance systems to be embedded with facial recognition technologies. The Commission paper, which gives an insight into proposals for a European approach to Artificial Intelligence, stipulates that a future regulatory framework could "include a time–limited ban on the use of facial recognition technology in public spaces." The document adds that the "use of facial recognition technology by private or public actors in public spaces would be prohibited for a definite period (e.g. More generally, the draft White Paper, the completed version of which the Commission should publish towards the end of February, features five regulatory options for Artificial Intelligence across the bloc. A Voluntary Labelling framework could consist of a legal instrument whereby developers could "chose to comply, on a voluntary basis, with requirements for ethical and trustworthy artificial intelligence." Should compliance in this area be guaranteed, a'label' of ethical or trustworthy artificial intelligence would be granted, with binding conditions. Option two focuses on a specific area of public concern – the use of artificial intelligence by public authorities – as well as the employment of facial recognition technologies generally. In the former area, the paper states that the EU could adopt an approach akin to the stance taken by Canada in its Directive on Automated Decision Making, which sets out minimum standards for government departments that wish to use an Automated Decision System. As for facial recognition, the Commission document highlights provisions from the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which give citizens "the right not to be subject of a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling." In the third area which the Commission is currently priming for regulation, legally binding instruments would apply only "to high–risk applications of artificial intelligence.

A new Google artificial intelligence model appears capable of more accurately spotting breast cancer in mammograms than radiologists; Fox News contributor Dr. Manny Alvarez reacts. The Silicon Valley libertarians at Google are spending a lot of money these days to keep the government out of the company's business. But their sudden aversion to government regulation is a newfound religion for Google: the company has been profiting for years off of a sweetheart deal with the government struck in 1996 -- a government subsidy which Google no longer deserves. Blockbuster reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that Google is no longer the neutral search platform they have long led consumers to believe they were. "It is not possible for an individual employee or a group of employees to manipulate our search results," Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress. "We don't manually intervene on any particular search result."

While this will yield increased profits for companies who can effectively leverage these technologies into new business models, what makes these developments truly revolutionary is their ability to tackle some of the world's most pressing challenges, ranging from education to health. Experts and fellows from the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution weigh in with their predictions for the most exciting ways in which new technologies will improve the state of the world in the coming year. When I was born in 1992, I arrived four months premature with every joint in my body bent together as tightly as possible -- from my head being pressed down on my right shoulder all the way down to my toes being pressed against the bottom of my feet and my ankles collapsed against the back of shins like a broken golf club. My twin sister had shared the same environment with me and was 100% healthy. There was only one culprit: a genetic mutation.

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Countries are rapidly developing "killer robots" - machines with artificial intelligence (AI) that independently kill - but are moving at a snail's pace on agreeing global rules over their use in future wars, warn technology and human rights experts. From drones and missiles to tanks and submarines, semi-autonomous weapons systems have been used for decades to eliminate targets in modern day warfare - but they all have human supervision. Nations such as the United States, Russia and Israel are now investing in developing lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) which can identify, target, and kill a person all on their own - but to date there are no international laws governing their use. "Some kind of human control is necessary ... Only humans can make context-specific judgements of distinction, proportionality and precautions in combat," said Peter Maurer, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have evolved an artificial intelligence-aided method to automate reading of legal judgements. A research team at the institute's Department of Computer Science and Engineering has developed two deep neural models to understand the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgement, an IIT KGP statement said here. This could be unique in India where the country uses a Common Law system that prioritises the doctrine of legal precedence over statutory law and where legal documents are often written in an unstructured way, a member of the team said. "Taking 50 judgments from the Supreme Court of India, we have segmented these by first labelling sentences with the help of three senior law students from IIT Kharagpur's Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law," Saptarshi Ghosh, professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, who is leading the research team, said. "We then performed extensive analysis of the human- assigned labels, and developed a high quality gold standard corpus to train the machine to carry out the task," Ghosh said.

The risks of an omnibus approach become clearer when we try to apply well-intentioned principles to specific, difficult policy trade-offs. Many regard European data privacy law as creating a comprehensive "right to explanation," requiring a human-readable justification for decisions rendered by AI systems. In some situations, that's an entirely appropriate demand, but in others it may unduly limit breakthrough innovations. A system that can accurately diagnose cancer by identifying enormously complex patterns in a patient's medical records, for example, might not be able to explain how it came to that conclusion. If it were effective and safe, however, shouldn't it be lawful, even if it isn't interpretable?

The transformative power of artificial intelligence has come to preoccupy big business and government as well as academics. But as AI's potential sinks in, a growing number of policy experts -- along with some leading figures in technology -- are asking tough questions: Should these cutting-edge algorithms be regulated, taxed or even, in certain cases, blocked? Consider what AI can do in the workplace. For example, managers realize that office politics, stress and other pressures take a toll on employees. They also know that standard-issue job-satisfaction surveys "don't provide a true gauge of what's going on" around the water cooler or in the staff lunchroom, says Jonathan Kreindler, Chief Executive Officer of Receptiviti.ai.

Last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" on the big screen for my 47th time. The fact that this masterpiece remains on nearly every relevant list of "top ten films" and is shown and discussed over a half-century after its 1968 release is a testament to the cultural achievement of its director Stanley Kubrick, writer Arthur C. Clarke, and their team of expert filmmakers. As with each viewing, I discovered or appreciated new details. But three iconic scenes -- HAL's silent murder of astronaut Frank Poole in the vacuum of outer space, HAL's silent medical murder of the three hibernating crewmen, and the poignant sorrowful "death" of HAL -- prompted deeper reflection, this time about the ethical conundrums of murder by a machine and of a machine. In the past few years experimental autonomous cars have led to the death of pedestrians and passengers alike. AI-powered bots, meanwhile, are infecting networks and influencing national elections. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris, and many other leading AI researchers have sounded the alarm: Unchecked, they say, AI may progress beyond our control and pose significant dangers to society. When astronauts Frank and Dave retreat to a pod to discuss HAL's apparent malfunctions and whether they should disconnect him, Dave imagines HAL's views and says: "Well I don't know what he'd think about it."