Ministers need to "immediately" update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal, legal experts say. In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be "reliable" unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: "It says, for the person who's saying'there's something wrong with this computer', that they have to prove it. Even if it's the person accusing them who has the information."

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Zuva, an AI-powered document processing platform, today announced that it closed a $20 million series A funding round led by New York-based Insight Partners. The company says that the capital, which is Zuva's first raise, will be put toward hiring, product, sales, and marketing development as well as R&D for current and future products. According to one source, over seven billion documents are created each year -- and 15 trillion copies are made. This leads to inefficiencies in processes across internal departments, particularly in light of pandemic-related remote and hybrid work challenges.

If ever there was an industry ripe for disruption it is surely the legal profession. Unlike many other sectors, however, it has tended to be a little reticent about embracing technology to innovate. After all, the traditional way of doing business for legal firms has been extremely profitable. The model typically involves a bunch of low-paid minions doing grunt work while a few partners earn eye-wateringly high sums. Moreover, many legal professionals look upon technology with fear and who could blame them when a forecast from Deloitte published last year predicted that more than 100,000 jobs in the sector could be automated within the next 20 years.

Despite being at its core a knowledge industry, the legal profession has been remarkably slow to adopt information technology outside of online databases such as LexisNexis and e-discovery software. The conservative nature of the profession, the intensive training that focuses on developing individual skills and knowledge and the lack of incentive for efficiency that is built into the hourly billing model all contribute to that resistance. Over the last few years, however, numerous artificial intelligence (AI) solutions have been developed for legal use, and the profession has begun to embrace, or perhaps be embraced by, those tools. A number of forces have converged to catalyze this market. First, the software products meet specific, well defined needs and therefore have been well accepted.

Artificial Lawyer spent 12 happy hours at the Legal Geek Conference on Brick Lane in East London yesterday and can confirm to those who might be wondering, that yes, this was the best legal tech event of the year. The success of the event was very much driven by an entrepreneur himself, Jimmy Vestbirk, who created Legal Geek and set the tone from the get-go, with a great Truman Brewery space for the event and mandatory high fives to the attendees sitting on either side. There was also a no ties policy and that deserves a special commendation. What set this event apart from others was that the speakers were the real thing. They were the founders and/or senior staff members of the legal AI companies everyone else is talking about.

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Noah Waisberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Kira Systems. We discussed how Kira Systems got started, how it is different to other AI systems and where it's going. Co-founder of Kira Systems, Noah Waisberg, used to be an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges, starting there as a junior associate in 2006. A lot of his work focused on M&A and he says he found himself spending a lot of time reviewing contracts during due diligence (DD). According to Waisberg, DD often amounts to between 30% and 60% of the legal bill law firms gave to their clients.

Deloitte today announced an alliance with Kira Systems to bring the power of machine learning to the workplace, an innovation that could help free workers from the tedium of reviewing contracts and other documents. The alliance will combine Deloitte's business insights in cognitive technologies with Kira Systems' advances in machine-learning in creating models that quickly "read" thousands of complex documents, extracting and structuring textual information for better analysis. This capability holds broad applications for the marketplace, said Craig Muraskin, Deloitte LLP, managing director of Deloitte's US Innovation group, as the extensive review of documents goes into many pressing business activities, including investigations, mergers, contract management, and leasing arrangements. "Wading through miles of corporate jargon hunting for key words and patterns can consume considerable time and resources," said Muraskin. "By teaming with Kira Systems we can help organizations reduce their review time while redeploying talent to higher value activities--let's save our eyes for more strategic matters." Noah Waisberg, CEO of Kira Systems, said recent innovations by his company, such as Kira Quick Study, are graduating machine learning to new levels of accomplishment.