Two major threats that the legal sector is facing at the moment are the growing number of alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) and the entry of the Big 4 accountancy firms – KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC. The result is an increasingly competitive market where clients want services that are cost efficient. In response, law firms have started to adopt technology-based solutions such as artificial intelligence (AI) in an attempt to lower costs. The most common way AI is being deployed is Technology Assisted Review (TAR). This means that barring documents that are specific to an agreement, most documents in a transaction tend to be boilerplate. Examples include employment contracts, licenses etc.

A former Air Self-Defense Force officer was arrested Friday on suspicion of leaking top secret information seven years ago about a U.S.-made E-2D airborne early warning plane. So Kanno, a 58-year-old former colonel who left the ASDF in 2017, is alleged to have used a personal computer to show data on its capabilities to a trading company employee who was not authorized to access the information. The lead allegedly occurred at Iruma Air Base in Saitama Prefecture around Jan. 9, 2013, the police said. The former colonel is also suspected to have given the employee a USB memory device containing the data, which was designated as a special defense secret under a 1954 law based on the Japan-U.S. Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. He has denied the allegation, according to investigators.

KHARAGPUR: Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have evolved an Artificial Intelligence-aided method to automate the reading of legal case judgments, the premier institute said in a statement on Friday. The researchers from IIT Kharagpur's Computer Science and Engineering department have developed two deep neural models to understand the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgment, which could prove phenomenal in India where AI is yet to sufficiently penetrate the legal field. The country uses a Common Law system that prioritises the doctrine of legal precedent over statutory law, and where legal documents are often written in an unstructured way. "Taking 50 judgments from the Supreme Court of India, we 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, then performing extensive analysis of the human-assigned labels and developing a high quality gold standard corpus to train the machine to carry out the task," explained research lead Professor Saptarshi Ghosh. Unlike earlier attempts which required substantial human intervention, the neural methods used by Ghosh's team enables automatic learning of the features, given sufficient amount of data, and can be used across multiple legal domains.

Google's owner Alphabet has become a trillion-dollar company for the first time, making it only the fourth US firm to reach the bumper valuation. Alphabet's value, based on the price of its Wall Street-listed shares, passed $1tn (£776bn) in the final minutes of trading on Thursday night, with shares closing at a record high of $1,450.16 It marks a stellar rise for Alphabet, which floated as Google for $85 a share in 2004. After its initial public offering, the Silicon Valley firm was worth $23bn. It has followed its tech rivals Microsoft, Apple and Amazon over the $1tn mark, amid a long rally in so-called Faang stocks. Google's value has steadily surged as it has tightened its grip on the search market, boosted its advertising revenues from web searches and YouTube, created and grown its Android mobile operating system, and launched a series of smart-tech products including Google Home and Google Assistant.

The EU could temporarily ban the use of facial recognition technology in public places such as train stations, sport stadiums and shopping centres over fears about creeping surveillance of European citizens. A prohibition lasting between three and five years is seen as a way for Brussels to manage the risks said to be posed by the breakneck speed at which the software is being adopted. The option is contained in an early draft of a European commission white paper obtained by the news website Euractiv. The final version is due to be published in February as part of a wider overhaul of the regulation of artificial intelligence. The draft document points to the right under the General Data Protection Regulation for EU citizens "not to be subject of a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling."

Your firm produces data, so surely it can benefit from applying AI, right? Here are five questions to ask yourself about whether a business problem is "AI-solvable". Machine learning, the latest incarnation of artificial intelligence (AI), works by detecting complex patterns in past data and using them to predict future data. Since almost all business decisions ultimately rely on predictions (about profits, employee performance, costs, regulation etc.) it would seem obvious that machine learning (ML) could be useful whenever "big" data are available to support business decisions. The reality in most organisations is that data may be captured but it is stored haphazardly.

In the 10 days leading up to Christmas this year, I searched on Instagram for three of my exes, an acquaintance I met on a trip to Cuba four years ago, an account dedicated to astrology memes, a past roommate, my own dog's account (@lucythetherapypup), my best friend's sweater-wearing poodle, a famous Pomeranian who lives in New York, a bird named Parfait I recently met at a San Francisco market, 10 contestants of the reality TV show Love Island, and the hashtag #wienerdog. I know all of this because Instagram told me. That's because this month, I submitted a data request under California's new privacy law to see just how much information the company has on me. What I got was a wide-ranging look at how my life has changed in the last 10 years since I first logged on to Instagram, and a window into what the company is willing to share about what it knows about me. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, I have the right to demand companies disclose "any personal information" they collect about me and request a copy of that information.

There's an emerging technology that is starting to gain traction in the tech world. Already featured in most major media networks, the role of deepfake artificial intelligence and virtual influencer (VI) touches on a variety of legal and ethical concerns that the business community should take notice of. Deepfakes are videos manipulated by AI to overlay images of celebrities or public figures in order to deceive viewers into believing the content is authentic. Recently, deepfake videos of Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Boris Johnson have all emerged and gone viral. In the state of California, recent legislation has made it "illegal to create or distribute videos, images or audio of politicians doctored to resemble real footage within 60 days of an election," according to The Guardian.

This event will take an in-depth look at how the creative community currently is using artificial intelligence (AI) to create original works. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended and space is limited.

The artificial intelligence community (AI) has recently engaged in activism in relation to their employers, other members of the community, and their governments in order to shape the societal and ethical implications of AI. It has achieved some notable successes, but prospects for further political organising and activism are uncertain. We survey activism by the AI community over the last six years; apply two analytical frameworks drawing upon the literature on epistemic communities, and worker organising and bargaining; and explore what they imply for the future prospects of the AI community. Success thus far has hinged on a coherent shared culture, and high bargaining power due to the high demand for a limited supply of AI talent. Both are crucial to the future of AI activism and worthy of sustained attention.