August 27, 2021
As a follow up to the June 11, 2021 post entitled “Application of AI in Legal Services,” this post examines the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in an additional legal area -- eDiscovery in litigation. One of the many time-consuming tasks in litigation is the review of documents to assess whether (a) a document is relevant to any outstanding discovery request or mandatory disclosure, and, if so, (b) if the document is covered by at least one factor that would prevent its disclosure (e.g., due to attorney work product, attorney-client privilege, spousal-privilege, and/or another privilege). Furthermore, document review often is performed with an eye toward flagging certain documents as being important to an issue in the case, either as part of a defense or as part of a party’s case in chief. <... Read more
Attorney:
Yuki Onoe
August 2, 2021
On July 15, a team of scientists published a Nature article, titled “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold.”[1] The article describes how the neural network model developed by Google’s DeepMind can predict protein structures “with atomic accuracy even where no similar structure is known.”[2] In addition, DeepMind has now open-sourced the code for AlphaFold 2, allowing further collaborations for even more accurate protein structure prediction.<... Read more
July 8, 2021
On June 22, 2021, a Western District of Texas jury returned a verdict in Freshhub, Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc., finding that Amazon’s Alexa devices do not infringe three voice technology patents owned by Freshub.[1] We want to report and discuss this case on the AI Patent Blog because virtual assistant software and products represent a commercially significant form of AI technology, and this case dives into the nuanced differences between legacy voice recognition software and modern AI-based virtual assistants.<... Read more
Attorney:
Sameer Gokhale
June 28, 2021
Following Ed Garlepp’s great discussion on AI disclosure issues[1][2], I want to describe a related problem with AI and issues arising under the written description requirement that I often bring up when presenting on this topic. I started raising this topic following an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley. One of the characters who lives in the incubator depicted in the show, Jian Yang, pitches an app to venture capitalists called “See Food” which is described as a “Shazam for food.” The user takes a picture of food, and then the app returns an identification of the food. Eventually Jian Yang does come up with an app that can identify food. The problem: it can only identify “hot dog” and “not hot dog.” When asked why he only created an app that only recognizes one type of food, Jian Yang explains that identifying more foods will require scraping significantly more images of food from the Internet to use as training data for a computational model.<... Read more
June 11, 2021
written by: Kasumi Kanetaka
A question that is often asked is why there are so many lawyers? The question is often paired with questions about why lawyers spend so much time on seemingly insignificant tasks and why they are always busy and have a poor work-life balance.<... Read more