Currently, the two largest companies in legal data-driven research are LexisNexis and Westlaw. They have databases that contain huge numbers of case details, and often serve as the default starting point for legal researchers. However, they are not a resource for running advanced analytical tools. Others are filling this gap in the market though. Brainspace, for example, is applying more analytically driven tools to unstructured data in ways that companies have previously not been able to do, and one application that it's been used for successfully is legal files.

A Southern California police officer gave a man less than a second to raise his hands before opening fire and killing him, a federal appeals court noted Friday in rejecting the officer's request to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against him. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Tustin Police Officer Osvaldo Villarreal couldn't reasonably have feared for his safety when he shot 31-year-old Benny Herrera after responding to a domestic dispute call in December 2011. That determination ran counter to the Orange County district attorney's office, which said in 2013 that the shooting was reasonable and justified because Villarreal fired after Herrera ignored orders to show his hands. A video captured by a police dashboard camera shows otherwise, according to the 9th Circuit judges who cited the footage. "Less than a second elapsed between Villarreal commanding Herrera to take his hand from his pocket and Villarreal shooting him," the court wrote.

When a debt is older than the statute of limitations, it's called time-barred debt. That means creditors don't have a legal right to sue you -- though debt collectors may still try. They also can continue to pursue you with phone calls and negative credit reporting. Proceed carefully, because debt collection has many pitfalls. There's a chance that you never took out this debt, that the collector is seeking the wrong amount or that you already paid and the collection is in error.

To the editor: Your article describes efforts to investigate Wells Fargo for predatory practices. This latest fine against Wells Fargo highlights industry-wide practices that have resulted in billions of dollars in fines in recent years. But, as a banker focusing on low-income communities, I don't believe these fines are eliminating unwanted behaviors. Real penalties -- suspension of business line licenses and holding top executives to equivalent consequences for aggressive sales cultures as front line staff and supervisors bear for the logical outcomes -- are essential for real reform. To the editor: It was interesting to see Wells Fargo's top management blaming the lower echelons in the company for the unsolicited accounts.

It has been 73 years since the Supreme Court ruled that students in public schools couldn't be forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag or engage in other patriotic demonstrations. But some educators obviously haven't gotten the message. In recent days, a principal in Florida told students they would be ejected from sports events if they didn't stand during the national anthem. A student in Northern California said her class-participation grade was lowered because she refused to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance, her chosen form of protest over the mistreatment of her Native American ancestors. A high school football player in Massachusetts said he was told he would be suspended if he emulated San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and knelt during the national anthem.

A well-dressed humanoid not named Ross. Lawyers often get a bad reputation for being slimy and conniving (deservedly or not), but ROSS has neither of those qualities. Ask ROSS to look up an obscure court ruling from 13 years ago, and ROSS will not only search for the case in an instant -- without contest or complaint -- but it'll offer opinions in plain language about the old ruling's relevance to the case at hand. Just about the only thing it can't do is fetch coffee. Not that anyone should blame it, seeing as ROSS is a piece of artificial intelligence software.

Chrissie Lightfoot takes a detailed look at how AI is used by law firms and what is on the horizon. As a futurist, an entrepreneur, and a lawyer, I always get asked, 'What do you think is the next big thing in the legal world?' I always begin my response with a catch-all reply: 'The next big thing is anything that helps you attract and keep a client. No client equals no business. A bit of a cliché, I know.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), long the subject of science fiction, is now becoming more and more widespread and is seen as an increasingly important computer science across multiple industries.In Financial Services in particular, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing is increasingly used today to make sense of big, complex data in a wide range of areas. One such area is regulatory compliance.The use of AI -- particularly Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a subset of Natural Language Processing –can help firms to realise a number of benefits, including improving the speed and efficiency with which they achieve compliance, and making that compliance much more robust. As we've seen over just the last couple of years with the introduction of MiFIDI & II, UCITS, AIFMD and the like, there is a constant stream of documents being issued by regulators, which can each run to hundreds, or even thousands, of pages. Wading through those documents and trying to pick out the pieces that are important so that appropriate rules can be built, code can be written and reporting systems can be automated (for example), is an onerous task for human beings. In order to achieve compliance, many regulated firms take the approach of partnering up with third party consulting firms, paying large sums to them to help interpret the regulations employing people to write up what everything means from a rules perspective, then attempting to code those rules into their systems.

A car is about to hit a dozen pedestrians. Is it better for the car to veer off the road and kill the driver but save the pedestrians? Or is it better to save the driver and kill all those other people? That's the thorny philosophical question that the makers of autonomous vehicles -- self-driving cars -- are grappling with these days, and a new study sheds some light on what people actually want that car to do. It turns out that the answer depends on whether you are the driver of the car or not.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), long the subject of science fiction, is now becoming more and more widespread and is seen as an increasingly important computer science across multiple industries. In Financial Services in particular, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing is increasingly used today to make sense of big, complex data in a wide range of areas. One such area is regulatory compliance. The use of AI – particularly Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a subset of Natural Language Processing – can help firms to realise a number of benefits, including improving the speed and efficiency with which they achieve compliance, and making that compliance much more robust. As we've seen over just the last couple of years with the introduction of MiFID I & II, UCITS, AIFMD and the like, there is a constant stream of documents being issued by regulators, which can each run to hundreds, or even thousands, of pages.