AI Tools

Catalog description

Elective Course This course teaches the fundamental principles of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, all technologies that continue to contribute to increasingly sophisticated legal technology. Students will learn how these technologies can affect the practice of law. Students will also participate in the design of AI tools for a field of law they select. As part of this design process, students must understand a particular legal decision made in that domain, identify the textual information that the lawyer or judge uses in making that decision, and understand how that information can be represented in textual form using diverse word and sentence structures. All of this establishes a broad architecture from which AI tools can be created. Consequently this course will also require that you acquire a more than superficial understanding of an area of law. You must learn how decisions are made in that area, what information is used, how exactly it is used, which decisions are objective and subjective, and how conflicting information is assessed by the decision maker. One class of tools that can be designed provides the lawyer with faster access to the information most relevant to the decision; the tool knows how to identify that information from a large set of documents and display that information to the lawyer. Another class of tools draws simple inferences from the information identified as relevant, such as by highlighting information for and against a proposition in different colors, or calculating a rough score of how much net 'weight' is in favor of one proposition.