For instance, consumer protection agencies and/or consumer organisations may be involved to a different degree, there may or may not be fines for using unfair contractual terms, etc. (Schulte-Nölke et al 2008). One thing that all member states have in common is that if a business uses unfair terms in their contracts, in principle there is always a competent party with the authority to challenge such contracts. Unfortunately, the legal mechanism for enforcing the prohibition of unfair contract terms have failed to effectively counter this practice so far. As reported by some literature (Loos and Luzak 2016), and as our own research indicates (Micklitz et al 2017), unfair contractual terms are, as of today, widely used in ToS of online platforms. In our previous research (Micklitz et al 2017), we developed a theoretical model of tasks that human lawyers currently need to carry out, before starting the legal proceedings concerning the abstract control of fairness of clauses.

Those of us in the professional services industry have a choice: Disrupt or be disrupted. New technologies are already changing the way operations are run and have the huge potential to drastically change the way the industry functions in the future. Companies must be prepared to embrace this or be left behind. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are just two of the technologies that are currently having a significant impact on today's enterprise. And the appetite is growing.

This call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Verisk's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Lee Shavel. Mr. Shavel, please go ahead. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our first quarter of 2018 financial results. With me on the call this morning are Scott Stephenson, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Anquillare, Chief Operating Officer. Following comments by Scott, Mark and myself, highlighting some key points about our financial performance, we will open the call for your questions. The earnings release referenced on this call as well as the associated 10-Q can be found in the Investors section of our website, verisk.com. The earnings release has also been attached to an 8-K that we have furnished to the SEC. We also filed an 8-K on April 26, 2018, with a description of our business segment recasting. A replay of this call will be available for 30 days on our website and by dial-in. Finally, as set forth in more detail in today's earnings release, I will remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements about Verisk's future performance. Actual performance could differ materially from what is suggested by our comments today. Information about the factors that could affect future performance is contained in our recent SEC filings. Now, I will turn the call over to Scott Stephenson. The first quarter was another example of our team achieving a high level of organic revenue growth, which remains the most important measure of our vitality as an organization. This growth was a product of our traditional multilevel growth plan including, first, the development of new customers for existing solutions, such as was seen in our claims analytics platform; secondly, the cross-selling of our existing solutions to existing customers as seen in our imagery solutions and upstream oil and gas analytics; and thirdly, new products including insurance data hosting. Over the last 90 days, I was particularly impressed by the quality of our engagement with many large leading customers resulting in real-time business wins and opportunities into the future. We continue to enjoy visits from the most senior leaders at some of our biggest customers who are looking to get closer to our pipeline of innovations. We held the largest gathering in our history for customers of our catastrophe analytics solutions and we're impressed again with the level of engagement and input from our clients.

In this episode Andrew Vaziri speaks with Nicolas Economou, CEO of the eDiscovery company H5 and co-founder and chair of the Science, Law and Society Initiative at Harvard's Kennedy School. Economou discusses how AI is applied in the legal system, as well as some of the key points from the recent "Global Governance of AI Roundtable". The roundtable, hosted by the government of the UAE and Harvard's Kennedy school, brought together a diverse group of leaders from tech companies, governments, and academia to discuss the societal implications of AI. Nicolas Economou is the chief executive of H5 and was a pioneer in advocating the application of scientific methods to electronic discovery. He contributes actively to advancing dialogue on public policy challenges at the intersection of law, science, and technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the business of law. Many firms are adopting the rapidly expanding suite of AI-powered tools to help their legal practitioners improve client relationships and deliver better outcomes. The burgeoning legal tech industry is putting an ever-expanding suite of AI-powered tools in the hands of law firms. Most tools are currently focused on lifting the burden of document review, analysis and research off your shoulders. Like all legal tech solutions, the goal of AI-powered tools is to offer lawyers new ways to facilitate the just, quick and cheap resolution of disputes and respond more appropriately to client needs.

New Delhi: When Vaishali Lotlikar joined Wanbury Ltd's legal department sometime in 2014, little did she know that locating a particular contract or assembling a legal brief would involve sifting through piles of documents, and wastage of precious hours and money in the process. "There was a lot of employee churn in the legal and marketing departments. Nobody really knew where the contracts were kept and what was there in each for the company to keep an eye on," she recalls. To streamline operations, Lotlikar and her team gathered all the contracts, digitized the same and put them into a document management system after tagging them for keywords, so that they could be easily searched when accessed from the firm's servers by authorized personnel. "I had used their technology at Glenmark and USV," says Lotlikar, adding that the familiarity helped her get up to speed.

"Humans at Instagram trained the system, which is built on a Facebook-developed text-processing system called DeepText, by sorting negative comments into categories, including bullying, racism, and sexual harassment, the New York Times reports" writes Steven Melendez Is for fastcompany.com. DeepText uses deep neural networks and other state-of-the-art machine-learning tools to try to parse language in context, Facebook has said.

The platform aims to simplify contract creation and management through lawyer-vetted templates. The law, they say, is for all, but its finer intricacies and nuances, clearly not. An entrepreneur, most likely, would focus on the big idea, its ability to scale, the target audience, the revenue model and funding avenues. Easy to assume then that writing contracts is not very high on the priority list, also given that it can be time-consuming and even confusing. Harvard Law School alumnus and Wall Street lawyer Shashank Bijapur found contract work intellectually rewarding but the 31-year-old, at times, felt that the task of copying old contracts to make new ones was cumbersome.

It is now just about a month before the GDPR regulation comes into effect. While it will force enterprises to take greater care of the personal data of their clients, there are implications for the development of emerging technologies too. It will, for example, make the deployment and use of artificial intelligence systems and apps more difficult and in some cases even slow down the rapid pace of ongoing development. If data is the new oil, prices just went up, John Koetsier, a mobile economist at TUNE, a mobile marketing measurement company in Seattle, said. GDPR makes collecting data harder and more expensive, and that will have an impact on artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has been declared "[t]he most important general-purpose technology of our era." It should come as no surprise to learn that AI is transforming the legal profession, just as it is changing so many other fields of endeavor. What do AI, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies mean for lawyers and the legal world? Will AI automate the work of attorneys -- or will it instead augment, helping lawyers to work more efficiently, effectively, and ethically? For the past few months, Above the Law and Thomson Reuters have been taking a deep dive into these questions.