Posts

Showing posts from October, 2017

The fallibility of AI and what to do about it

Image
 Go to any legal or technology conference, and speaker after speaker will tell you AI is the next BIG thing. Huge strides have been made in in underlying technologies allowing new tasks to be performed quickly by that would take human teams weeks.   This is certainly true. For example, LawPanel’s algorithmic comprehensive trademark search has performed 1m searches that would have taken a team of 10 attorneys working 10 hours a day 45 years to complete.   And yet..   What you won’t hear people talk about so much is the fallibility of AI, and the importance of both system design and the legal processes it sits within to identify and mitigate errors. Take our trademark clearance searches. For searches users run themselves, we do not give a categorical ‘available’ or ‘unavailable’ to register. 98% of the time the algorithm is in line with attorney opinion on similarity. However, it is more fallible on distinctiveness or descriptiveness.   For those who’ve heard of the T