What happens when a rideshare driver is suddenly locked out of the platform connecting them to riders, wages, and daily work? Deactivation-the abrupt removal of gig workers' platform access-typically occurs through arbitrary AI and algorithmic decisions with little explanation or recourse. This represents one of the most severe forms of algorithmic control and often devastates workers' financial stability. Recent U.S. state policies now mandate appeals processes and recovering compensation during the period of wrongful deactivation based on past earnings. Yet, labor organizers still lack effective tools to support these complex, error-prone workflows. We designed FareShare, a computational tool automating lost wage estimation for deactivated drivers, through a 6 month partnership with the State of Washington's largest rideshare labor union. Over the following 3 months, our field deployment of FareShare registered 178 account signups. We observed that the tool could reduce lost wage calculation time by over 95%, eliminate manual data entry errors, and enable legal teams to generate arbitration-ready reports more efficiently. Beyond these gains, the deployment also surfaced important socio-technical challenges around trust, consent, and tool adoption in high-stakes labor contexts.

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told Last Week Tonight's John Oliver a chilling but memorable hypothetical story a decade ago about the potential dangers of AI. The gist is a group of scientists build a superintelligent computer and ask it, "Is there a God?" The computer answers, "There is now" and a bolt of lightning zaps the plug preventing it from being shut down. Let's hope that's not what happened with OpenAI and some missing evidence from the New York Times' plagiarism lawsuit. Wired reported that a court declaration filed by the New York Times on Wednesday says that OpenAI's engineers accidentally erased evidence of the AI's training data that took a long time to research and compile.

As the contract lifecycle management company Ironclad is today releasing its AI redlining tool AI Assist out of beta, is has revealed that the tool is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, making it what Ironclad says is the first contract redlining application powered by the latest version of Open AI's generative AI. "The results with AI Assist have been beyond what we could even have imagined," said Ironclad CEO and co-founder, Jason Boehmig. "An initial pass at contract redlining usually takes about 40 minutes. Already, some large enterprises are using Ironclad AI to review over 50% of their incoming contracts, so the compounding business impact there is unprecedented." Although Ironclad says that this is the first redlining tool to use GPT-4, Casetext's CoCounsel, which is built on GPT-4, has capabilities for checking contract policy compliance and suggesting redlines to bring contracts into compliance. It should also be noted that there are other contract redlining tools on the market that use AI, but not GPT-4.

Eleanor Lightbody is CEO of Luminance, a leading provider of AI technology for document review and legal process automation. As I look ahead to 2023, it feels in many ways that we are entering the year with a similar sense of uncertainty to the one before. Soaring inflation, along with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and supply chain insecurity, has left the global economy on the precipice of a recession. And as these stresses combine, businesses--and the legal teams that sit at the heart of them--are finding themselves on the front lines of dealing with the growing ramifications. Economic uncertainty is creating an environment of enhanced commercial risk and concern around existing liabilities.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer told reporters Tuesday he believes Hunter Biden was "in proximity" to the classified documents found in President Biden's garage. Hunter Biden's lawyers called on federal and state prosecutors across the country to open criminal investigations into his critics on Wednesday – and in doing so, acknowledged that the notorious laptop is indeed Hunter's. Biden's attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote letters to the Justice Department and the Delaware attorney general calling for investigations into Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Mac Isaac, who owns the computer repair shop where Biden is said to have left his laptop. Biden's lawyers also sent cease and desist letters to others who obtained and disseminated the laptop's contents. Lowell argued in the letters that Mac Isaac and the others had no right to inspect the contents of Biden's laptop, much less make copies of it to share with the media.

Artificial Intelligence promises an exciting future and tremendous growth, provided that legal professionals able to navigate their business in this novel environment. Many companies make massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI), and more and more AI products and technologies are being launched by companies that are not traditional software companies. This signals a transition where traditional engineering companies invest in software capabilities and position AI as a critical way to disrupt their markets and gain market share. That transition does not come without challenges for legal teams. Lawyers need to keep abreast of new and fast-evolving technologies and familiarise themselves with novel technical concepts like "machine learning" or "black box AI".

This past June, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a probe into Tesla's autopilot software. Data gathered from 16 crashes raised concerns over the possibility that Tesla's AI may be programmed to quit when a crash is imminent. This way, the car's driver, not the manufacturer, would be legally liable at the moment of impact. It echoes the revelation that Uber's self-driving car, which hit and killed a woman, detected her six seconds before impact. But the AI was not programmed to recognize pedestrians outside of designated crosswalks.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. If there is one thing common to all legal cases, it is documents. In decades past, the evidence collected in litigation was often confined to digging through folders and filing cabinets, in a process called discovery. Today, electronic discovery, or'ediscovery,' is the name of the game – with paper documents replaced by millions of emails, Slack messages and Zoom calls. MarketsandMarkets estimates the global ediscovery market size to grow from $9.3 billion in 2020 to $12.9 billion by 2025.

One of Europe's largest business software providers, with 14,000 employees, 1,135,000 private and public sector customers across the Nordics, Benelux, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, Visma, has adopted Luminance's AI-powered legal process automation tool as part of its M&A due diligence reviews, as the Oslo-headquartered company looks to continue its rapid growth trajectory that has seen a net revenue of €1.74 billion in 2020. Norway's Visma made a record 42 acquisitions in 2021. This increased M&A activity means the company's in-house legal department must review large volumes of data when assessing acquisition opportunities and analysing areas of risk and opportunity. Hjalmar Florijn, Head of Legal at Visma Benelux, commented that the rapid insight from Luminance will also help them to keep more M&A work in-house and reduce reliance on external counsel: "As Visma continues to experience rapid growth, it is critical that we can instantly understand the contractual landscape of an acquisition target. With Luminance, our in-house legal teams will be able to uncover critical findings earlier in the review process, giving us confidence that we have been appraised of all possible risks and allowing us to plan our business strategy accordingly," said Florijn.

Phil Sokowicz is the co-founder and Managing Director of the legal tech company helpcheck, providing people with easy access to justice. We've seen artificial intelligence technology deployed across a number of industries, making it possible to complete laborious tasks with more speed, accuracy and efficiency. The legal sector is no different. As more firms lean into digital innovation and the use of AI to automate day-to-day tasks, AI is capable of improving services and increasing productivity there too. Although AI in the legal industry is still in its infancy, its applications are already streamlining low-value, repetitive tasks and assisting associates in simplifying the mundane and time-consuming responsibilities of legal practice.