Love.Law.Robots. by Ang Hou Fu

ArtificalIntelligence

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I love playing with legal data. For me, books specialising in legal data are uncommon, especially those dealing with what’s available on the wild world of the internet today.

That’s why I snapped up Sarah Sutherland’s “Legal Data and Information in Practice”. Ms Sutherland was CEO of CanLII, one of the most admirable LIIs. CanLII is extensive, comprehensive, and packed with great features like noting up and keywords. It even comes in two languages.

Legal Data and Information in Practice: How Data and the Law InteractLegal Data and Information in Practice provides readers with an understanding of how to facilitate the acquisition, management, and use of legal data in organizations such as libraries, courts, governments, universities, and start-ups.Presenting a synthesis of information about legal data that will…Routledge & CRC PressSarah A. Sutherland

The book’s blurb recommends that it is “ essential reading for those in the law library community who are based in English-speaking countries with a common law tradition ”.

Since finishing the book, I found the blurb’s focus way too narrow. This is a book for anyone who loves legal data.

For one, I enjoyed the approachable language. My interaction with legal data has always been pragmatic. Either I was studying for some course, or I needed to find an answer quickly. It will be enough to appreciate the book if you’ve done any of those things. I liked that it didn’t baffle me with impossible or theoretical language. I found myself nodding at several junctures as I reflected on my experience of interacting with legal data as well.

Furthermore, it’s effectively a primer:

  • It’s short. I took a month to finish it at a leisurely place (i.e., in between taking care of children, making sure the legal department runs smoothly, and programming). Oh, and unlike most law books, it has pictures.
  • It effectively explains a broad range of topics. It talks about the challenges of AI and the political and administrative backgrounds of how legal data is provided without overwhelming you. More impressively, I found new areas in this field that I didn’t know about before reading the book, such as the various strategies to acquire legal data and an overview of statistical and machine learning techniques on data.

So, even if you are not a librarian or a legal technologist by profession, this book is still handy for you. I would love more depth, and maybe that’s some scope for a 2nd edition. In any case, Sarah Sutherland’s “Legal Data and Information in Practice” is a great starting point for everyone. Reading it will level up your ability to discuss and evaluate what’s going on in this exciting field.

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I am sorry for being a sucker — I am the kind of guy who watches movies to swoon at sweeping visages of my home jurisdiction, Singapore. I enjoyed Crazy Rich Asians, even though it’s fake.

So, I couldn’t resist looking for references to Singapore in the book. Luckily for me, Singapore is mentioned several times in the book. It’s described as “an interesting example of what can happen if a government is willing to invest heavily in developing capacity in legal computing and data use”. I’m not convinced that LawNet is like an LII, but among other points raised, such as the infrastructure, availability and formats are still much better here than in the rest of the common law world.

The more interesting point is that Singapore, as a small jurisdiction, would usually find its dataset smaller. That’s why experimenting on making models trained on other kinds of data effective on yours is crucial. (I think the paper cited in the book is an excellent example of this.) Other facets are relevant when you have fewer data and resources: what kinds of legal data should one focus on and the strategies to acquire them.

The challenges of a smaller dataset seem to be less exciting because fewer people are staring at them. However, I would suggest that these challenges are more prevalent than you would expect — companies and organisations also have smaller datasets and fewer resources. What would work for Singapore should be of interest to many others.

There’s always something to be excited about in this field. What do you think?

#BookReview #ArtificalIntelligence #DataMining #Law #LegalTech #MachineLearning #NaturalLanguageProcessing #Singapore #TechnologyLaw

Author Portrait Love.Law.Robots. – A blog by Ang Hou Fu

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October is drawing to a close, and so the end of the year is almost upon us. It's hard to fathom that I have been stuck working from home for nearly 20 months now. Some countries seemed to have moved on, but I doubt we'd do so in Singapore. Nevertheless, it's time for reflection and thinking about what to do about the future.

What I am reading now

The Importance of Being AuthorisedA recent case shows that practising law as an unauthorised person can have serious effects. What does this hold for other people who may be interested in alternative legal services?Love.Law.Robots.HoufuAn in-depth analysis of a rare and recent local decision touching on this point.

CLM Simplified: Efficient Contracting for Law Departments : Bassli, Lucy Endel: Amazon.sg: BooksCLM Simplified: Efficient Contracting for Law Departments : Bassli, Lucy Endel: Amazon.sg: BooksLucy Endel BassliI earn a commission from purchases made with this link.

  • Do you need a lot of coding or technical skills to use AI? This commentator from Today Online highlights Hugging Face, Gradio and Streamlit and doesn't think so. So have we finally resolved the question of whether lawyers need to code? I still think the answer is very nuanced — one person can compile a graph using free tools quickly, but making it production-ready is tough and won't be free. I agree more with the premise that we need to better empower students and others to “seek out AI services and solutions on their own”. In the Legal field, this starts with having more data out there available for all to use.

Why you don’t need to be an expert to use AI any moreKeeping up with the latest developments in artificial intelligence is like drinking from the proverbial fire hose, as a recent 188-page overview by two tech investors Ian Hogarth and Nathan Benaich would attest.TODAYonline

Post Updates

This week saw the debut of my third feature — “It's Open. It's Free — Public Legal Information in Singapore”. I have been working on it for several months, and it's still a work in progress. I made it as part of my research into what materials to scrape, and I've hinted at the project several times recently. In due course, I want to add more obscure courts and tribunals, including the PDPC and others. You can check the page regularly, or I would mention it here from time to time. I welcome your comments and suggestions on what I should cover.

That's it!

Family Playing A Board Game. An Asian family \(adult male and female and two adolescents, male and female\) sitting around a coffee table playing a board game. Photographer Bill BransonPhoto by National Cancer Institute / Unsplash

At the start of this newsletter, I mentioned that November is the month to be looking forward. 😋 Unfortunately, for the time being, I would be racing to finish articles that I had wanted to write since the pandemic started. This includes my observations from playing Monopoly Junior 5 million times. You can look at a sneak peek of the work in my Streamlit app (if it runs).

In the meantime, I would be trying the weights and cons of using MongoDB or SQL for my scraping project. Storing text and downloads on S3 is pretty straightforward, but where should I store the metadata of the decisions? If anyone has an opinion, I could use some advice!

Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out!

#Newsletter #ArtificalIntelligence #BookReview #Contracts #DataMining #Law #DataScience #LegalTech #Programming #Singapore #Streamlit #WebScraping

Author Portrait Love.Law.Robots. – A blog by Ang Hou Fu