Legal Cheek reports..
The University of Oxford’s Professor Rebecca Williams will deliver the closing keynote at this year’s LegalEdCon, a virtual event, taking place on Thursday 14 May.
Williams will use the slot to announce the findings of Oxford’s ‘Unlocking the Potential of Artificial Intelligence for English Law’ research project.
She will focus in particular on the future of legal education in relation to changes to the legal job market resulting from implementation of lawtech, changes in the business models of law firms and developments in the law brought about by technology.
Williams, along with fellow Oxford Uni akamdeics Ewart Keep and Václav Jane?ek, are responsible for the legal education stream of Oxford’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded AI for English Law project. The project as a whole brings together researchers from computer science, law, economics, education and the Saïd Business School to examine the potential and limitations of using AI in support of legal services.
The legal education stream in particular addresses the need to educate professionals to deliver legal services in the digital economy and to enable them to respond to technological change, while also equipping software engineers with an awareness of and an ability to work with legal education.
The trio told Legal Cheek:
“We are excited to have the opportunity to share our initial findings at LegalEdCon and look forward to discussing our views on the future of legal education and training.”
Unlocking the Potential of Artificial Intelligence for English Law
https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/unlocking-potential-artificial-intelligence-english-law
A project funded by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund’s (ISCF) Next Generation Services Research Programme and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), run by researchers in the Oxford departments and faculties of Law, Economics, Computer Science, Education and the Said Business School, in 2019 and 2020.
The proposed research will explore the potential and limitations of using artificial intelligence (AI) in support of legal services. AI’s capabilities have made enormous recent leaps; many expect it to transform how the economy operates. In particular, activities relying on human knowledge to create value, insulated until now from mechanisation, are facing dramatic change.
Legal services contribute to the economy both through revenues of service providers and through benefits provided to clients. For large business clients, who can choose which legal regime will govern their affairs, UK legal services are an export good. For small businesses and citizens, working within the domestic legal system, UK legal services affect costs directly. Yet, unlike other professions the legal system has a dual role in society. Beyond the law’s role in governing economic order, the legal system is more fundamentally a structure for social order. It sets out rules agreed on by society, and also the limits of politicians’ ability to enact these rules.
Consequently, the stakes for AI’s implementation in UK legal services are high. If mishandled, it could threaten both economic success and governance generally. If executed effectively, it is an opportunity to improve legal services not only for export but also for citizens and domestic small businesses. Our research seeks to identify how constraints on the implementation of AI in legal services can be relaxed to unlock its potential for good. With careful positioning, the UK’s strength in AI research and relatively liberal legal services regulation may allow it to establish a comparative advantage in AI for legal services.
Project Structure
The project consists of 6 interlocking work packages (WPs)
WP1, WP4 and WP5 look at complementarities that support implementation of AI, respectively at the firm level (strategy and governance), the sector level (skill investment and technology transfer), the country level (comparisons of national skills and innovation policies) and the individual level (technology-driven education, skills and training). WP2 seeks to map the constraints of legitimacy and current technology for digital dispute resolution, and WP3 is work on semantic systems at the technological frontier of AI in legal reasoning. In addition to research, WP5 involves a significant component of knowledge exchange through co-development of educational packages with our partner organisations. Results from the other WPs will feed into the content of these packages
Read about the project work packages
Click here for Research Findings, Reports, and White Papers