2024 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology Symposium


The Symposium will take place on February 15 at the University of Minnesota Law School, Room 25, located at 229 S. 19th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55454.

Join via Zoom

RSVP below to confirm attendance, and please contact Vivian Lin at lin00791@umn.edu if you have any questions.

RVSP


Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology (JLST) is excited to invite you to join our 2024 spring symposium: Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Legal Research and Decision-Making: Opportunities and Risks.

As AI garners increased attention and transforms various industries, it is inevitable that the legal sector will also experience its influence. In this context, our focus centers on the integration of AI in legal research and decision-making, aspects we believe hold relevance for practitioners. To delve into this intersection of law and technology, we have curated insights from seven esteemed scholars in the field. Each scholar presents a concise paper encapsulating their latest thoughts on AI’s role in the legal industry. Our format includes dedicated 35-minute discussions for each paper, complemented by the perspective of a practitioner proficient in both law and technology, who shares personal experiences and opinions on the practical implications of AI in legal work during our lunch session.

Schedule:
Breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided.
9:00 – 9:15: Introduction from Caroline Moriarty (JLST Editor in Chief)

9:15 – 9:50 am: Session 1 – John Villasenor, Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Law: Impact, Opportunities, and Risks
John Villasenor is a professor at UCLA, where he has faculty appointments in electrical engineering, law, public policy, and management. He founded and serves as a faculty co-director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Villasenor’s work addresses the intersection of technology and law in relation to areas including digital communications, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and privacy.  He has published extensively in technical and law academic journals, and has also published in broader interest venues including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Scientific American. Professor Villasenor has provided congressional testimony on multiple occasions.

10:00 – 10:35 am: Session 2 – Kevin Frazier, Practicing Law in the Age of AI: Practice Guide – How to Integrate AI and Emerging Technology into Your Practice and Comply with Model Rule 3.1
Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor of Law at St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law since 2023, previously served as a Judicial Clerk to Chief Justice Mike McGrath of the Montana Supreme Court. His research delves into the intersection of emerging technology, democratic design, and the law, examining how governance systems adapt to rapid technological advancements. Professor Frazier’s extensive scholarship has appeared in numerous journals such as the Rutgers University Law Review, Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, and Notre Dame Journal of Emerging Technology. His going status as a Senior Research Affiliate with the Legal Priorities Project allows Professor Frazier to remain on the vanguard of updating laws and the legal profession in response to emerging technologies.

10:45 – 11:20 am: Session 3 – Zoe E. Niesel, Arbitrary and Capricious x Artificial Intelligence
Zoe E. Niesel is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Albert Herrman Professor of Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law. Professor Niesel is a distinguished legal scholar specializing in civil procedure, federal court jurisdiction, and administrative law. Her insightful work, featured in reputable journals like the Indiana Law Journal and Cardozo Law Review, explores the impact of technology on civil and administrative procedural concepts. Beyond academia, Professor Niesel has practical experience, having clerked for the Hon. Thomas D. Schroder and worked in complex commercial litigation. In her role as the law school’s Director of Assessment and Statistics, she employs data-driven approaches to enhance curriculum programming and assessments.

11:20 – 12:30 pm: Lunch Break. LUNCH SERVED OUTSIDE MONDALE HALL RM. 25

11:45 am: Keynote speech by Damien Riehl, LawGPT: Generative AI, ChatGPT, LLMs, and the Legal Data-Driven Revolution
Damien Riehl is a lawyer and technologist with experience in complex litigation, digital forensics, and software development. A coder since 1985 and for the web since 1995, Damien clerked for the chief judges of state and federal courts, practiced in complex litigation for over a decade, has led teams of cybersecurity and world-spanning digital forensics investigations, and has led teams in legal-software development. An appointee of the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Connected and Automated Vehicles, he has helped recommend changes to Minnesota statutes, rules, and policies — all related to connected and autonomous vehicles. Damien is Chair of the Minnesota State Bar Association’s working group on AI and the Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL). At SALI, the legal data standard he helps lead, Damien develops and has greatly expanded the taxonomy of over 14,000 legal tags that matter, helping the legal industry’s development of Generative AI, analytics, and interoperability. At vLex Group — which includes Fastcase, NextChapter, and Docket Alarm — Damien helps lead the design, development, and expansion of various products, integrating AI-backed technologies (e.g., GPT) to improve legal workflows and to power legal data analytics. “This guy [Damien] rocks!” – Elon Musk

12:30 – 1:05 pm: Session 4 – Daniel E. Ho & Peter Henderson, Contradictory Linguistics: Tensions Between Empirical Semantic Meaning and Judicial Interpretation
Daniel E. Ho is the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law, Political Science, and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. As a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and Director of the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab), his research has played an important role in shaping AI policy and public sector AI. Ho’s extensive involvement includes serving on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, as Senior Advisor on Responsible AI at the U.S. Department of Labor, and on the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. His scholarship focuses on administrative law, regulatory policy, and antidiscrimination law. With the RegLab, he spearheads impactful projects integrating data science and machine learning into public policy. Ho’s contributions have garnered numerous awards for teaching and research.

Peter Henderson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. Affiliated with the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, his research spans AI safety, interdisciplinary methods in law and AI, and core work on legal doctrine and policy addressing real-world uses of AI. Henderson’s impactful contributions have gained recognition from notable sources like TechCrunch, Science, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. With a background including roles at Amazon AWS/Alexa, the California Supreme Court, and the Internal Revenue Service, Henderson brings a wealth of experience to his work at the intersection of machine learning and public policy.

1:15 – 1:50 pm: Session 5 – Amy Beth Cyphert, Generative AI, Plagiarism, and Copyright Infringement in Legal Documents
Amy Beth Cyphert is a Lecturer in Law at West Virginia University College of Law. An expert in Artificial Intelligence and the Law, Cyphert developed and teaches a course on the subject. Her recent research delves into generative AI’s impact on legal practice, technology regulation, and algorithmic decision-making in the criminal justice system. In 2021, she received the Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award for her influential work on machine-learning algorithms and online surveillance.

2:00 – 2:35 pm: Session 6 – S. Sean Tu & Amy Beth Cyphert, Artificial Intelligence: Legal Reasoning, Legal Research and Legal Writing
S. Sean Tu is a Professor of Law at West Virginia University College of Law. As a recognized expert in patent and drug law, is affiliated with Harvard Medical School’s Program On Regulation, Therapeutics And Law (PORTAL) and a Scholar at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. With over fifty publications, his focus lies in the intersection of patent law and drug pricing. He has published in top journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Biotechnology and the Stanford Technology Law Review, among others. As a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School, he received a grant from the National Institutes of Health Care Management for his research. Professor Tu, an expert witness and entrepreneur, has played a key role in founding companies in patent prosecution analytics and biotechnology, particularly in cancer cell biology.

CLE credits:
4.5 standard CLE credits have been requested. Event code #499674.