And, today, I’m pleased to round out the quantitative legal data mining and prediction roster by announcing our final panelist of that session. Excited to confirm that Itai Gurari will be speaking on the panel, joining already-announced panelists Josh Walker and Dan Katz. Itai is a lawyer and software engineer currently working on the immense project that is Google Scholar, where he is working to develop legal search solutions around the authoritativeness and content of cases.
He formerly worked as a litigation associate at Jones Day, and was a researcher with the big brains over at IBM’s Haifa Research Lab. He is also the founder of Tracelaw, a project that focuses on case law search and semantic analysis.
Thrilled to have him! Stay tuned tomorrow — we’ll begin announcing the guests that we’ve confirmed for the panel on legal automation, and we’re planning to have registration open up formally later this week.
As promised, another speaker announcement coming out over the blog-waves today, excited to announce that researcher Dan Katz will be participating on our NELIC session on quantitative data mining and prediction in the legal system! Dan is PhD Candidate and currently a fellow in Empirical Legal Studies over at the University of Michigan. He’s also fellow at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems.
The NELIC team came across Dan’s work fairly recently – and it’s amazing stuff. He’s been working on large scale network analysis of the legal system and looking at a variety of topics in that space. That includes mapping the topology of the judiciary to detect systematic change in legal doctrines, tracing the complexity of systems of statutes, and a host of others you definitely need to check out if you haven’t seen it already.
To boot, he’s also one of the proprietors of the endlessly great resource that is the Computational Legal Studies blog. We’re thrilled to have him. We’ve updated the schedule accordingly — stay tuned for more tomorrow!
Thrilled to announce today what will be the first in a series of speaker announcements rolling throughout this week and into next week. As mentioned before, shaping up to be a tremendous set of panelists, and we couldn’t be happier over here at NELIC headquarters.
Today — we’re excited to go public today with news that Josh Walker will be speaking at NELIC! Josh is the founder of the Stanford Center for Computers and Law, an interdisciplinary lab that examines how technology might radically enhance quality and efficiency in the legal system while reducing cost. He currently serves as CEO of Lex Machina, a company that is building one of the largest and most powerful empirical databases of patent and infringement outcomes in the world.
You can read more about Josh here. He’ll be bringing his ample experience and research to our panel on quantitative data mining and prediction on the legal system. Excited to have him! Announcing another panelist for that session tomorrow, stay tuned — we’ll also be updating the conference schedule as they come out.
Excited and just wanted to share this along — the New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference now has an official logo! Celebrations all around.
We’ve been hard at work assembling speakers and guests for each of the panels, and we’ve got a few that are just about fully put together. It’s going to be an amazing group of speakers — stay tuned for some big announcements this week.
As promised, after noodling around with a bunch of ideas, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes on a few projects to take place and launch this spring, but today I’m glad to officially go public with one of them.
Terrifically excited today to announce that we’ll be hosting the first ever New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference (NELIC). We’ve secured space at Berkeley Law School on April 15th, to hold a one-day conference bringing together the technologists, entrepreneurs, and lawyers who are working on the biggest disruptive technologies and platforms in the legal industry. There’ll be four sessions, spanning a whole range of topics, specifically:
1) Quantitative Legal Prediction
Might recent work in machine learning and natural language processing influence legal practice and strategy? To what extent can judicial decision-making be reduced to statistical modeling and prediction?
2) Legal Financing and Securitization
As banks and other firms continue to experiment with the finance and investment of lawsuits, what is the long-term impact on the legal marketplace? Could it open the door to securitization and larger tradable legal assets?
3) The Future of Legal Automation
What is the current state of the automation of legal tasks, and how far can it scale? How much can be replaced by these applications, and what does the legal profession look like in a world of broad automation and commodification?
4) Legal Interfaces and User Experiences
Interacting with the law through simple, easy-to-use online platforms opens the possibility for broadening accessibility to the legal system. How might this be used?
We’re in the process of bringing together the speakers for each of the sessions, and will be making announcements on this as things continue to come together in February. Currently, registration is closed (and will be opening later in March), but if you or your organization would be interested in attending the event, drop a line to thwang@berkeley.edu!
