Abstract: 

Legaltech products for lawyers now abound, many claiming to be powered by ML, at the cutting edge of NLP or generating “deep” insights from data. This is a huge and rapidly growing market. But lawyers are a highly regulated profession, bound by ‘the law of lawyering’ and their professional codes. So what is it that lawyers want from Legaltech? What kind of assurances do legal professionals need in order to trust Legaltech and use it confidently, and what types of ethical issues arise? This presentation looks at issues around data, legal prediction and language, and how they intersect with lawyers’ responsibilities.

Bio: 

Dr Felicity Bell, PhD, is a Research Fellow for the Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession (FLIP) Research Stream, funded by the Law Society of New South Wales and based at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. FLIP provides research and thought leadership on the core concerns of the legal profession into the future. Felicity’s research looks at law and technology, and how lawyers’ regulation, professionalism and ethics interact with innovation in law. She has published widely and recently co-authored the book Artificial Intelligence and the Legal Profession (Hart, 2020).