Developments in technology over the past few years have revolutionised the way consumers operate, and this is starting to have some pretty interesting effects on the legal industry. A particularly exciting technological development is the emergence of online access to free legal help. One free help site which holds immense potential to transform the legal industry is the site created by a 19 year-old student called Joshua Browder. The site helps to advise claimants on a range of low-level legal issues such as reclaiming Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), seeking compensation for flight delays and fighting parking tickets. This differs from other online legal advice sites such as AskALawyer and Lawyers Online because instead of relying on real life legal professionals to provide advice to site users, Browder's site uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to advise potential claimants.

There's been lots of talk during the past week about how artificial intelligence–the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence–is impacting the legal profession and the delivery of services. I saved the following to read later and thought our readers would also find them interesting. How AI is transforming the legal profession. How artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession, ABA Journal – "Artificial intelligence is changing the way lawyers think, the way they do business and the way they interact with clients. Artificial intelligence is more than legal technology. It is the next great hope that will revolutionize the legal profession."

If there are n number of instances in data, probability of'success' is 1/n and for the failure, its (n-1)/n. In the specific case of a bootstrap sample, the sample size b equals the number of instances n. Thus the probability of the instance being selected atleast once is 1-1/e 0.632 Grid search is computationally expensive as it checks for all the possible combinations of the parameters specified and evaluates on the same. Lets say if two parameters are A and B, and the possible ranges specified are 0-2 and 0-3 respectively; The possible combinations in the parameter space in case of grid search would be (0,0) (0,1) (0,2) (0,3) ...........(2,2) (2,3). Although grid search can be made to run in parallel, still the technique is not computationally very efficient .

Are we headed for a future of robot lawyers, online judges, mechanical mediators, cyborg litigators and android attorneys? Reading some recent media headlines, you would think so. Last year in Dublin, a conference warned that lawyers must'cut fees or face a future led by robots'. In fact, headlines have been predicting this onslaught of the machines ever since IBM's Watson (a question-answering supercomputer) beat two human Jeopardy! But it's not just the press – many practitioners see the same future.

We've covered robot writers before, but to date it has never been much of a concern for actual writers. Robots just aren't that good at doing what we do; although Microsoft's'Tay' did prove to be pretty great at going from zero to off-the-rails after dealing with some nasty Twitter comments -- something any writer can relate to. Until now, "robot writers" -- artificial intelligence programs taught to write -- were mainly only good at penning quick stories based on data-heavy reports. Box scores, stock reports, and the like were basically all the programs were capable of doing well. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech.

It took just two tweets for an internet troll going by the name of Ryan Poole to get Tay to become antisemitic. Tay was a "chatbot" set up by Microsoft on 23 March, a computer-generated personality to simulate the online ramblings of a teenage girl. Poole suggested to Tay: "The Jews prolly did 9/11. I don't really know but it seems likely." Shortly thereafter Tay tweeted "Jews did 9/11" and called for a race war. In the 24 hours it took Microsoft to shut her down, Tay had abused President Obama, suggested Hitler was right, called feminism a disease and delivered a stream of online hate.

WASHINGTON – A Boeing company manager convicted of child pornography charges in December says he has a right to know what arguments the government used to obtain the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now, the Los Angeles case is testing a defendant's ability to access information about himself presented to the nation's secretive intelligence court, which issued the warrant that let agents scour his computers. At issue is how the government uses evidence derived through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and under what circumstances that information should be seen by defendants, particularly when it's repurposed for a routine criminal prosecution that has nothing to do with national security. Gartenlaub and his lawyers say they have a right to know the government's arguments that were used to obtain the warrant, and fight them. "You can't base a search on lies," the 47-year-old said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Using machine-learning to forecast which accused perpetrators of domestic violence -- particularly those whose crimes result in injuries -- will be re-arrested on similar charges can cut such recidivism in half, according to a recent report. Machine learning used during the arraignment process prevented "well over" 1,000 domestic violence incidents annually in at least one large metropolitan area, according to authors Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School, and Susan B. Sorenson, director of the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence. For their study, "Forecasting Domestic Violence: A Machine Learning Approach to Help Inform Arraignment Decisions," Berk and Sorenson analyzed 28,646 domestic violence arraignments that led to official charges and the corresponding releases. "Under current practice, about 20 percent of the individuals released after arraignment are arrested for domestic violence within two years. If magistrates only released offenders our forecasts identified as good bets… [f]ailures could be cut in half."

The growing capabilities and widening use of artificial intelligence applications (AI apps) in mainstream consumer devices (eg Siri on the iPhone 6S and Amazon's Alexa being just two examples, plus the whole conversations-as-a-platform development) are converging to poise interesting intellectual property challenges. While currently the most sophisticated of these apps are, at best, in an advanced-alpha or early-beta version, this technology is fueled by innovation moving at an exponential rate. About six months ago I became involved in an intellectual property infringement case involving artificial intelligence applications. But – finally – my academic work in AI was bearing fruit. The case involves what are called Level B apps, part of a computational capability-continuum first proposed by Eran Kahana who is a technology and intellectual property attorney with extensive IP experience and a senior Fellow at Stanford Law School.

As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course) building robots of beautiful women. Anyone who's turned on a TV in the past decade shouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the first--and creepiest--examples of this development involves movie star Scarlett Johansson. News broke on Friday about a Hong Kong designer who made a robot that looks just like the award-winning actress--although Ricky Ma, the robot's creator, wouldn't name the actress he modeled the bot on, choosing instead to call it Mark 1. It took Ma eighteen months and over 50,000 to complete the project, which he constructed on his patio with a 3-D printer and software that he taught himself how to use. The question, however, is one of precedent.