8:30-9:30am Breakfast, registration and vendors
9:30-9:45am Welcoming Remarks
Robert (Bob) DeFabrizio, President of ABLL
Kevin Coakley-Welch, President of ABLL
Jocelyn Kennedy, Executive Director, Harvard Law School Library
Mindy Kent, Manager, Research Services, Harvard Law School Library, Jocelyn Kennedy, Executive Director, Harvard Law School Library
9:45-11:00am Keynote, Professor Christopher T. Bavitz, WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law and Managing Director, Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
11:00-12:00pm Law Librarian panel, moderated by Bob Ambrogi: Kara Mack (Goodwin); Chris Laut (Sullivan and Worcester); Mary Jenkins (Director, Research Solutions, Accufile, Inc.)
12:00-1:30pm Lunch
1:30-4:00pm Afternoon sessions: Simultaneous sessions from which you can choose (full session descriptions still in progress) within or across tracks.
Access to Justice Track
1:40-2:50pm REMOTE: John Mayer, CALI , Why You Should Be Skeptical of Most AI Hype in Legal Applications or Your Job Is Safe From the Robots - Mostly
There has been an awful lot of press on Artificial Intelligence and how robots will replace lawyers, judges and such. As with any technological hype, there are very interesting things afoot and technology does have a way of changing our lives and work in amazing, horrible and unexpected ways. In this talk, I will mostly be an "AI Skeptic" and try to explain why computers will not replace legal professionals in the near future. I will, however, make the case for certain types of AI that are having a substantive impact on how legal services get delivered.
Matthew Stubenberg, Associate Director of Legal Technology, Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School
AI, algorithms, and big data is going to reshape every aspect of how nonprofit legal services deliver help. Software will identify a client’s legal issue before they walk into your office. Intake will be transformed into programs auto gathering information from big data sources. Algorithms will push legal service providers (LSPs) to focus on people whose problems fall into a structured model that can be handled quickly. The algorithms will be so accurate that lawyers will seem like an unnecessary expense and Courts will allow paralegals to do more and more of the representation. Bespoke complex attorney driven representation will become a smaller and smaller piece of the LSPs core function. The LSP of the future will focus on non-lawyer legal professionals shepherding cases based on the outputs of an algorithm built by AI and trained on big data.
Facilitated on site by Kyle Courtney, Copyright Advisor for Harvard University
3:00-4:00pm David Colarusso, Suffolk Law School (in collaboration with the LLNE Service Committee), Learned Hands Project
David Colarusso will give an introduction to Learned Hands, an online game that trains machine learning to help increase access to justice. Then play the game in a tournament hosted by the LLNE Service Committee. Let’s see how many points LLNE can earn! See Service Project.
PLEASE BRING YOUR OWN LAPTOP OR CELL PHONE.
Teaching and Tools Track
1:40-2:50pm Roundtable on Algorithmic Justice, Facilitated by Michelle Baildon, Collection Strategy Team Lead, Francis Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Sofia Leung, and Maya Bergamasco , Reference Librarian, Harvard Law School Library
3:00-4:00pm Heidi Alexander, Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers, AI in Practice: Is It for Everyone? The Impact of AI and Automated Solutions on Small Firms
Large firms and corporate legal departments are already making use of AI technologies in the legal department for contract analysis, data analytics, and legal research. But, many of the better known tools haven’t been scaled for practitioners on limited or smaller budgets, i.e. solo and small firms.
This session will dive into some of the new AI tools available for smaller practices to improve office efficiency and accuracy of work product, thus providing better client service and enabling more effective competition with larger scale practices. It will also look at some of AI’s sister technologies, “automated” solutions, which may be more costs efficient and that bring significant advantages to small firms.
The legal technology market is booming. Get ready to be wow’d by what you never knew existed.
3:00-4:00pm Roundtable on teaching algorithms in legal research classes, facilitated by AJ Blechner, Research Librarian & Library Instruction Coordinator, Harvard Law School Library
Tech Track
1:40-4:00pm Andromeda Yelton, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (hands on exercises to learn about machine learning), Is it a cat or is it metadata?: Machine Learning for Librarians
How does machine learning work? In this hands-on session, you’ll learn key principles of machine learning in the context of real-world library applications (and also cat pictures). You’ll dig into real machine learning code -- no programming experience required -- and critically evaluate the results. By the end of the session, you’ll know several ways machine learning can be applied to library data, and some good reasons people should -- and shouldn’t -- try this. PLEASE BRING YOUR OWN LAPTOP.
4:15-6:00pm Reception and library tours, Drawing for books if you submit your evaluation form!