After 40 Years of Constant Change, What’s Next for the Legal Industry?  — from law.com by Dan Packel
Few could have anticipated the dramatic shift in scope and scale the industry has undergone since The American Lawyer’s founding 40 years ago. We asked some of the law’s brightest thinkers what we can expect over the next 10.

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Technology and Upheaval
While it’s easy to conclude that the technological revolution that’s already been unleashed will continue to drive transformation over the next 10 years, it’s harder to pinpoint how.

Expect more and more tasks to become subject to automation—not just contracts and e-discovery but also areas like trademarks and due diligence for mergers, for starters.

Technology and artificial intelligence on their own are noteworthy, but what’s more compelling is the impact they will have on how firms are structured.

“Everything that can be taken out of the hands of subject-matter experts and handed over to the process experts and technologists will be,” says Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe Chairman and CEO Mitch Zuklie. “There will be far fewer associates sitting in rooms with documents and more strategic partnerships among law firms and legal tech providers.”

This transition could help chip away at the supremacy of the billable hour.

Not only will technology move up the value chain for litigation, it will also emerge as a greater player on the deal side. Jae Um, director of pricing strategy at Baker McKenzie, expects to see a much greater focus on compliance and regulatory technology in the next five years.

As AI solutions, which depend upon machine learning, are slowly deployed in the marketplace, their efficacy will inevitably grow.

 

How about a little wild speculation to wrap this up?  With more nonlawyer specialists finding professional homes in law firms, it’s a short leap to hybrids between law firms and professional services operations. Imagine consultants and accountants working together with lawyers and technologists to solve clients’ increasingly complex problems. And what about a high-profile merger between a Big Four firm and a global law firm? I wouldn’t rule it out.

 

 

10 Must-Have Elements in a Structured Online Learning Journey [Infographic] — from blog.commlabindia.com

Excerpt:

Haven’t we all heard that it’s always about the journey and not the destination? It’s the same for learning as well. Simply dumping content in an online format doesn’t make learning effective. What matters is designing and developing content, keeping in mind adult learning principles and strong instructional design.

If learning has to be an enriching experience, work on crafting a memorable learning journey. Wondering how to do this?

 

5 Reasons Why BU’s $24K MBA Is A Big Deal — from insidehighered.com by Joshua Kim
Why I’m intrigued.

Excerpt:

The newly announced $24K BU MBA, created in partnership with edX, is a big deal.

Here are 5 reasons why:
#1: The Evolving Connection Between Status and Price:

The Boston University Questrom School of Business is ranked in the top 50 global business schools by US News, in the top 70 by the Economist. Questrom is a brand name business school in a market where the value of the MBA is directly proportional to the status of the institution.

Today, status and price are tightly correlated in the postsecondary market. This is especially true in professional education. Student prices are not set at costs, but at perceived value.

BU should be given credit for challenging this status quo. I suspect that the Questrom $24K MBA will end up improving BU’s place in the global MBA rankings.

 

What is different now is that it will not only be enthusiasm for learning science that will drive schools (and MBA programs) to improve their programs. It will be the market. 

 

Online programs fueling boot camp sector’s growth in 2019 — from educationdive.com by Hallie Busta

Dive Brief (emphasis DSC):

  • Growth in online programs is expected to drive gains in the boot camp sector this year, according to an annual survey from Course Report about the market for non-college boot camps.
  • More than 23,000 graduates across 110 boot camp providers are expected for 2019, a figure that is up 50% year-over-year. Online programs are expected to grow at more than three times that pace to reach 5,519 graduates in 2019 across 14 providers. Course Report counts only full-time, synchronous programs toward its online tally.
  • Boot camps are increasingly looking to companies and colleges as partners, with the latter often including credit-bearing options, Liz Eggleston, co-founder of Course Report, told Education Dive in an interview.
 

AI is in danger of becoming too male — new research — from singularityhub.com by Juan Mateos-Garcia and Joysy John

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

But current AI systems are far from perfect. They tend to reflect the biases of the data used to train them and to break down when they face unexpected situations.

So do we really want to turn these bias-prone, brittle technologies into the foundation stones of tomorrow’s economy?

One way to minimize AI risks is to increase the diversity of the teams involved in their development. As research on collective decision-making and creativity suggests, groups that are more cognitively diverse tend to make better decisions. Unfortunately, this is a far cry from the situation in the community currently developing AI systems. And a lack of gender diversity is one important (although not the only) dimension of this.

A review published by the AI Now Institute earlier this year showed that less than 20 percent of the researchers applying to prestigious AI conferences are women, and that only a quarter of undergraduates studying AI at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley are female.

 


From DSC:
My niece just left a very lucrative programming job and managerial role at Microsoft after working there for several years. As a single woman, she got tired of fighting the culture there. 

It was again a reminder to me that there are significant ramifications to the cultures of the big tech companies…especially given the power of these emerging technologies and the growing influence they are having on our culture.


Addendum on 8/20/19:

  • Google’s Hate Speech Detection A.I. Has a Racial Bias Problem — from fortunes.com by Jonathan Vanian
    Excerpt:
    A Google-created tool that uses artificial intelligence to police hate speech in online comments on sites like the New York Times has become racially biased, according to a new study. The tool, developed by Google and a subsidiary of its parent company, often classified comments written in the African-American vernacular as toxic, researchers from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence said in a paper presented in early August at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in Florence, Italy.
    .
  • On the positive side of things:
    Number of Female Students, Students of Color Tackling Computer Science AP on the Rise — from thejournal.com
 

New Michigan court program could let you resolve legal disputes for free online — from freep.com by Emma Keith

Excerpts:

If you’ve got an issue with your landlord, a friend who owes you money or a serious problem with your neighbors, you may not have to take it to court.

Thanks to a new tool from the Michigan court system, some Michiganders can now solve civil disputes and small claims cases online.

MI Resolve offers users in certain Michigan counties a chance to go through an online resolution and mediation process whether or not their case has gotten to court.

The program is meant to increase equitable access to legal resources and respond to Michigan residents’ goals for their state courts, said Bridget McCormack, chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.

The program is meant to resolve small claims, contract disputes, neighborhood disputes, and small landlord/tenant matters. It won’t handle an eviction but will handle rent or maintenance issues.

 

Also see:

 

Per Jacob Strom at HeraldPR.com:

KreatAR, a subsidiary of The Glimpse Group, is helping change the way students and teachers are using augmented reality technology with PostReality, to help make learning more interactive with poster boards.

See:

 


Also see:

 

 

China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns. — from technologyreview.com by Karen Hao
In recent years, the country has rushed to pursue “intelligent education.” Now its billion-dollar ed-tech companies are planning to export their vision overseas.

Excerpt:

Zhou Yi was terrible at math. He risked never getting into college. Then a company called Squirrel AI came to his middle school in Hangzhou, China, promising personalized tutoring. He had tried tutoring services before, but this one was different: instead of a human teacher, an AI algorithm would curate his lessons. The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%. Two years later, he scored an 85% on his final middle school exam.

“I used to think math was terrifying,” he says. “But through tutoring, I realized it really isn’t that hard. It helped me take the first step down a different path.”

 

The strategy has fueled mind-boggling growth. In the five years since it was founded, the company has opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students—equal to New York City’s entire public school system. It plans to expand to 2,000 more centers domestically within a year. To date, the company has also raised over $180 million in funding. At the end of last year, it gained unicorn status, surpassing $1 billion in valuation.

 

Dallas County Community College District Students Receive “GreenLight”? Toward Ownership, Lifelong Access of Academic Records — from linkedin.com by Timothy Marshall; with thanks to Mike Mathews for this resource out on LinkedIn

Excerpt:

(DALLAS) — Gone are the days of a lengthy and sometimes costly process to request educational records for job or college applications. Through its investments in groundbreaking technology, DCCCD is allowing students unprecedented access to their educational transcripts. This places students in the unique position to maintain lifelong digital ownership of their complete academic credentials, with the flexibility to use those records to propel them toward academic and career success.

DCCCD is pleased to announce a new partnership with Dallas-based GreenLight Credentials, a new secure digital locker. With GreenLight, DCCCD students will have wide-ranging access to their academic records anytime, anyplace, by simply clicking a button.

 

Imagining new futures for students, nurses, prisoners and more — from extendedmind.io

Excerpt:

Jessica Outlaw and Trevor F. Smith hosted an interdisciplinary gathering of educators, technologists, and designers at the Outlaw Center for Immersive Behavioral Science at Concordia University to discuss how instructional design can be transformed by the unique capabilities of immersive web technology, with an emphasis on VR & AR.

This blog is part 2 of the recap of the Instructional Design Summit that took place on June 3, 2019. To read part 1, which covered what experts in instructional design said about the immersive web, click here.

In this blog post, we will share output from the day’s workshop activity. The goal was to stimulate new ideas, build connections across disciplines, and give participants the experience of imagining multiple futures in a systemic way.

 

From DSC:
I appreciated their offering up potential scenarios or futures for each area. We all need to be doing this and thinking like this.

 

 

DSC: Holy smokes!!! How might this be applied to education/learning/training in the 21st century!?!

DC: Holy smokes!!! How might this be applied to education/learning/training in the 21st century!?!

 

“What if neither distance nor language mattered? What if technology could help you be anywhere you need to be and speak any language? Using AI technology and holographic experiences this is possible, and it is revolutionary.”

 

 

Also see:

Microsoft has a wild hologram that translates HoloLens keynotes into Japanese — from theverge.com by
Azure and HoloLens combine for a hint at the future

Excerpt:

Microsoft has created a hologram that will transform someone into a digital speaker of another language. The software giant unveiled the technology during a keynote at the Microsoft Inspire partner conference [on 7/17/19] in Las Vegas. Microsoft recently scanned Julia White, a company executive for Azure, at a Mixed Reality capture studio to transform her into an exact hologram replica.

The digital version appeared onstage to translate the keynote into Japanese. Microsoft has used its Azure AI technologies and neural text-to-speech to make this possible. It works by taking recordings of White’s voice, in order to create a personalized voice signature, to make it sound like she’s speaking Japanese.

 

 

 

Texas A&M Launches State’s First Inclusive 4-Year College Program for Students with Disabilities — from people.com by Char Adams
Aggie ACHIEVE is the state’s first four-year postsecondary education program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities

Excerpt:

Texas A&M University is opening the door to higher education for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities — making history as the first program of its kind in the state.

The school has vowed to help students with disabilities realize their dreams of becoming Aggies with a four-year post-secondary education program specifically designed to support them, the public university announced in a statement.

Texas A&M Launches State's First Inclusive 4-Year College Program for Students with Disabilities

 

 

5 Years Since Starbucks Offered to Help Baristas Attend College, How Many Have Graduated? — from edsurge.com by Rebecca Koenig

Excerpts:

…nearly 3,000 Starbucks employees who have earned bachelor’s degrees online through the company-university partnership program.

 

The arrangement was possible logistically because Humberstone took her courses in business and environmental sustainability entirely online. And it was feasible financially because Starbucks and Arizona State University covered most of her tuition bill.

 

A new immersive classroom uses AI and VR to teach Mandarin Chinese — from technologyreview.com by Karen Hao
Students will learn the language by ordering food or haggling with street vendors on a virtual Beijing street.

Excerpt:

Often the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in an environment where people speak it. The constant exposure, along with the pressure to communicate, helps you swiftly pick up and practice new vocabulary. But not everyone gets the opportunity to live or study abroad.

In a new collaboration with IBM Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a university based in Troy, New York, now offers its students studying Chinese another option: a 360-degree virtual environment that teleports them to the busy streets of Beijing or a crowded Chinese restaurant. Students get to haggle with street vendors or order food, and the environment is equipped with different AI capabilities to respond to them in real time.

 

 

 
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