AI and Issues to Consider in the Legal Space

Sarah Sutherland spoke about AI and Bias at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference in May and AALL Conference in July. In the August 13 edition of SLAW, she discusses some of her thoughts on the topic. She addresses the warranted concern that AI has inherent biases based on the data it uses. The primary sources of bias are datasets that don’t “represent the full underlying position” or data may be representative but, “the dataset as a whole is biased”. Food for thought.

An Amazing Line-up of Authors and Events at the Melbourne Writers Festival

The Melbourne Writers Festival, the theme of which is When We Talk About Love runs from 30 August – 8 September. An amazing line-up of international guests will be there including Val McDermid, Patrick deWitt, Tayari Jones, DeRay Mckesson, former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark, and Daniel Mallory Ortberg to name a few. They join Australian guests Richard Flanagan, Jane Caro, Virginia Trioli, Paul Kennedy, Clementine Ford, Ben Quilty, and Don Walker to name just a few! Something for literally everyone!

Evan Koblentz’s Top 10 IT Trends of the Last 20 Years

Off the top of our heads, there are a few top trends we could mention, including big data, cloud computing, and security. Then there are a few we have either forgotten about, or that wouldn’t have crossed our minds. His list and explanation of each trend makes for interesting reading.

Survey Indicates ALSPs Losing Business

Writing in Law.com, Victoria Hudgins discusses a Baretz & Brunelle survey that identifies alternative legal service providers are losing business because they are not “explaining how their products and services solves problems”. In February, the Softlink IC blog page included an article on the rise of outsourcing in-house law libraries and paralegal staff to ALSPs. It also noted early adopters of services outsourcing in other sectors are beginning to take them back. Is it teething problems or, the perceived savings from off-loading service costs not quite living up to expectation?