April 25, 2019

A Computer Takes the LSAT: Question 9

This is the 7th in a series of posts describing how to encode LSAT Puzzles in the Ergo Lite programming language. To start from the beginning, go to the introductory post. In this post, we will encode Question 9, which reads: 9. If Greed is shown exactly three times, Harvest is shown exactly twice, and Limelight is shown exactly once, then which one of the following must be true? (A) All three films are shown on Thursday.

April 25, 2019

A Computer Takes the LSAT: Question 10

This is the 8th in a series of posts about encoding LSAT Puzzles in the Ergo Lite programming language. To start from the beginning, go to the introductory post. In this post, we will encode the last question, question 10. It reads: 10. If Limelight is shown exactly three times, Harvest is shown exactly twice, and Greed is shown exactly once, then which one of the following is a complete and accurate list of the films that could be the first film shown on Thursday?

April 25, 2019

A Computer Takes the LSAT: The Preamble

This is the second in a series of posts demonstrating how to encode LSAT Puzzle questions in the Ergo Lite programming language. To start from the beginning, go to the introductory post. In this post, we will encode the “preamble” to the section of questions. These are the basic rules that apply to all of the following questions. By analogy to automating legal services, these rules represent statute law or regulations.

April 25, 2019

A Computer Takes the LSAT: Introduction

In this series of posts I’m going to show you what it looks like when you use a programming language called Ergo Lite to get a computer to answer puzzle questions from an LSAT exam. The LSAT is the standardized admissions exam that most lawyers in North America will have suffered through, so I’m hoping it is a sort of shared experience that gives us lawyers a shared starting point.

April 1, 2019

Demo: Logic Coding Inside Docassemble

Logic coding is awesome for automating legal services, and more lawyers should be doing it.-Me. I’m on a mission to prove that. I’ve got a list of obstacles in front of me that look distinctly like opportunities. Take for example, the opportunity “programming is hard.” I am working on www.Blawx.com, which aims to make learning it way easier. Check out this short demo video for more details. Another opportunity is that people don’t know how to get value out of logic programming.

January 28, 2019

Utterly Unpersuasive: Formal Methods and Law

This is a story in which Hillel Wayne attempts to answer the question why don’t more programmers use formal methods? Formal methods are techniques that allow you to say with confidence that your software is right, instead of just trying it and waiting for a bug to show you where the software was wrong. They can be applied to laws and contracts, too, but aren’t. But should be. That’s why I read the article, to see if there is something that I could learn about how to make formal methods more popular in law.

January 8, 2019

Blawx Prototype Redux

I posted here earlier about a prototype tool that I’m working on to make it easier for lawyers to use declarative programming tools for automating legal reasoning. It’s called “Blawx.” I spent some more time working on it over the weekend, and made some progress, as you can see in the (now narrated) video linked below. I have implemented code generation based on the block diagram, implemented the reasoner online with a CGI wrapper so that it can be accessed by the Blawx page, updated the interface to have an answer window at the bottom, and have changed the way that answers are received so that it is possible to get back the answers to questions that have more than one solution.

January 3, 2019

Sorry, but blockchain is not the next revolution in law.

I was invited to write a piece as a guest blogger for Slaw.ca, one of the premier legal blogs in Canada, on blockchain nonsense. If you wonder why so many people 🙄 at the mention of blockchain, it might be useful to you. Check it out.

January 2, 2019

Blawx: Seeking Feedback on a Prototype Tool for Encoding Law

I study declarative programming tools for automating legal reasoning in my Computational Law LLM at the University of Alberta. What I have learned is that they are both very powerful, and highly inaccessible for normal legal service providers. I have had an idea in my head for how to solve that problem for a long time now. I’ve told people about it, but it’s the sort of thing that needs to be shown to be understood.

December 27, 2018

Can Visual Programming Work for Lawyers?

I posted the image below to Twitter last night. It is a prototype I’m working on for a legal reasoning programming tool for lawyers. I got an interesting reply about how visual programming attempts have usually failed, because they don’t scale well with complexity of the code, and they tend not to be integrated with the other software development tools. That sent me on a search for more detail, which led me to this blog post by Mike Hadlow.

December 19, 2018

Innovation Achieved

I believe the access to justice problem cannot be significantly improved in the short or medium term without automating legal services. One of the difficult aspects of automating legal services has been finding a way to automatically get explainable predictions for subjective, discretionary legal issues. What does that mean with less jargon? Computers have been pretty good, for at least the last 40 years, at telling you whether or not you are a citizen, or what your taxes should be.

December 7, 2018

Integrating Docassemble and Clio: Part 2

My ABA Innovation Fellowship project, through the ABA’s Centre for Innovation, is docassemble-openlcbr, an open-source tool to bring the power of analogical reasoning to docassemble, the leading open source legal expert system tool. If you’d like some background, check out my post on why I study expert systems, and my post on introducing analogical reasoning to docassemble. Clio is the leading cloud-based legal practice management software in North America. Clio has generously agreed to sponsor my fellowship, which has allowed me to expand the scope of project considerably, including by integrating it with Clio.

November 29, 2018

Blockchain Hogwash at Law School

I’m an LLM student at the University of Alberta studying computational law. One of my advisors recently gave me a copy of a handout that had been provided to some of his undergraduate law students by practitioners who had been invited as guest speakers. Now, I don’t know who actually attended. What I know is that there are two names on the document. Both of them are partners in a top-10 law firm in Canada.

November 27, 2018

Analogical Reasoning Tool Design, Easy Enough for Lawyers

My ABA Innovation Fellowship project, through the ABA Center for Innovation, is docassemble-openlcbr. It is an open source software package that extends the capabilities of docassemble, a leading open source legal expert system tool.* (How leading? Of the top 20 web tools announced by the ABA this week, one is docassemble, and two more were built using docassemble. ) Docassemble-openlcbr allows docassemble interview developers to use another open source tool, OpenLCBR, to automate legal reasoning about subjective questions.

November 13, 2018

Integrating Docassemble and Clio

Clio is the leading cloud-based legal practice management tool in North America. Clio’s support of my Innovation Fellowship with the ABA Centre for Innovation has given me the opportunity to expand the project in a couple of really interesting ways. Today, I’d like to share with you the first part of that expansion: making it possible to do analogical reasoning about case data held in your Clio account. docassemble-openlcbr For background, my innovation fellowship project is to add the power of case-based reasoning by analogy provided by the openlcbr tool to the open-source legal expert system and document automation tool docassemble.

October 24, 2018

Automating Case-Based Reasoning By Analogy-A Deep Dive

Next in my series of blog posts on my ABA Center for Innovation Innovation Fellowship, sponsored by Clio, I’d like to show you how a computer does case-based reasoning by analogy by taking a deep dive into the IBP algorithm. If you’d like to try the live demo of the tool I’m describing, click here. The Background: IBP In 2003, Kevin Ashley and Stefanie Brüninghaus published a paper in which they described an algorithm they called “Issue Based Prediction” or IBP.

October 19, 2018

Legal Expert Systems Just Got Smarter

For nearly 40 years, the automation of legal services has hit a brick wall when it came to dealing with subjective questions. Until recently, it just wasn’t possible at all. Recently, machine learning has made it possible, but it can’t explain how it came to the conclusion. We need an automated system that can answer subjective questions, and explain its answers. It is a critical missing tool in the access to justice toolbox.

October 9, 2018

Why I Study ‘Old’ Artificial Intelligence in Law

I was honoured to be named the ABA Innovation Fellows for 2018/2019. As I go through that fellowship, I want to share my story and the story of my project here. To start, I’d like to give you a little background on myself, and what I study. I am an LL.M. student 👨‍🎓 in Computational Law 👨‍💻⚖, at the University of Alberta. I’m studying declarative programming languages that can be used to automate legal reasoning.

September 3, 2018

Some Lawyers Should Be Expert Coders

Another round of “should lawyers learn to code” started up in the Twittersphere this week. The arguments against it are not new. “Lawyers should learn to work with coders, not be coders.” “Specialization of skills is better than a person who tries to know everything.” “Lawyers don’t need to learn to code, they need to learn to use Microsoft Word properly.” The defenders pipe up and say: “There is a difference between teaching someone to code, and making them a developer.

June 28, 2018

An Ontology of Law and Technology

I propose the following ontology in order to describe intersections of law and technology. The defining factors are a) the relationship between law and technology, and b) the value proposition of the tool. With regard to the relationship, it seems to me that there are the following alternatives: Law for Technology Technology for Law The first category, L4T, includes things like intellectual property laws. It is legal rules that pertain to innovative methods of doing things.

January 8, 2018

The 3 technologies that won’t shake up the legal world in 2018.

I’m a pro-technology lawyer. Like really pro-technology. But I’m depressed at the state of the reporting of technology in the legal field, generally. The Lawyer Daily posted a story entitled “Three technologies that will shake up the legal world in 2018,” and I read the first sentence and stopped caring. Their three technologies are artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the cloud. Artificial Intelligence is not going to shake up the legal world in 2018.

July 26, 2017

What I Learned at Law and Formal Logic Summer School

In the Piazza del Duomo in Florence, Italy, just next to a gelato store, and behind the caricature artists selling three-minute masterpieces to tourists, there is a statue of the architect Brunelleschi. His eyes are lifted skyward and to the right, and on his face is an expression of thoughtfulness, hope, and perhaps a hint of concern. He had every reason to be concerned. If one follows the statue’s gaze, one sees that it is looking at the dome atop the Florence Cathedral, known as the Duomo.

Rules as Code Diary

Research, Learn, Code, Share, Repeat.