In this edition of the Priori Digest, a weekly look at what’s happening in law and technology, we look at how AI is transforming lawyers’ work and the justice system, the combined worth of the Big 5 tech companies and tech innovators’ relationship to regulation. Enjoy!
What we’re reading
- More law schools, including Cornell and NYU, are now accepting the GRE in addition to the LSAT for admissions
- How the embrace of AI technology by law firms, particularly for due diligence and discovery, could transform lawyers’ work and slash costs for clients
- How work-related stress is negatively affecting America’s healthcare system and economy
- Tech innovators have changed their approach with regulators over the past few years. Rather than causing disruption and dealing with the regulatory consequences after, companies are now more likely to ask regulators for permission
- The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab have collaborated to create the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative which aims at bolstering the use of AI for the public good through evidence-based research. One of their projects is called AI: Algorithms and Justice, which seeks to explore how governments and legal systems can effectively use the technology
What in the weird
- The newly formed nation and ‘space kingdom’ of Asgardia wants to have a permanent settlement on the moon within 25 years
- Facebook removes posts featuring paintings by baroque Flemish artists due to nudity
By the numbers
- 408 trillion: The Big 5 tech companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple) are now worth a combined $4.08 trillion. If they were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world by GDP
- 5: Ways to tell if you are talking to a bot online
- 175 billion: The amount (USD) of venture capital money invested globally through the first half of 2018, already more than the annual totals from the years between 2002 and 2016