187 | 🤓🔍 Compare 5 AI models' legal research capabilities

In today’s Brainyacts:

1. Slow news day = personal sharing (sorry)

2. Compare 5 AI models' legal research capabilities

3. PWC Legal going deeper into GenAI and other AI model news

4. AI Job hot spots and other AI-related content

👋 to new subscribers!

To read previous editions, click here.

Lead Memo

🤔🪞 Brief Personal Update

Slow news day so please pardon my vanity. I am sharing the following more to illustrate activity focused on modernizing the legal market.

I am happy to share that I am joining the faculty at The Mauer School of Law, Indiana University. This is a full-time role. I will be teaching (more on that below) as well as building a revenue-generating executive education program. In some ways, this is a continuation of my success at Richmond Law. In others, it is a departure. Regardless I am thrilled that I will be back in the law school classroom this Fall and beyond.

What I will teach

I am starting with - you guessed it - a course on generative AI. I am sharing the description below. This is geared for 2nd and 3rd year students. Soon I will be augmenting this for executive education offerings. My hope is to partner with one of the foremost authorities in Artificial Intelligence that just so happens to be part of IU - The Luddy Artificial Intelligence Center. Luddy is a multidisciplinary center that focuses on human-centered AI - speaking directly to my design background.

Beyond AI, I will be bringing business design and the entrepreneurship mindset into the curriculum. I want to get law students thinking as builders and makers, not just thinkers and billers 😁 .

Course Title: Practical Applications of Generative AI in Legal Practice

The course begins with an introduction to AI, highlighting the transition from basic AI to ML, and then to more complex systems like GenAI and LLMs. Students will learn the differences between unsupervised and supervised learning, and the nuances of discriminative and generative models, with a focus on how these technologies are shaping the future of legal practice. Lawyers must understand how these models are built, what they are built with, and how to control them.

A significant portion of the course will be dedicated to hands-on training with Generative AI models, emphasizing their adaptability through fine-tuning for legal-specific tasks. Students will gain practical experience in prompt design and learn how to leverage these models to maximize efficiency and accuracy in day-to-day work, legal analysis, and document generation.

The course will also provide a critical examination of the legal dilemmas posed by GenAI, including data privacy, copyright and intellectual property issues, the challenges of deepfakes as evidence, and the ethical considerations in AI deployment. Through case studies and real-world examples, students will engage with current and pressing legal debates, preparing them to address these issues competently in their future careers.

By the end of the course, students will possess a robust understanding of GenAI’s working principles, be adept at utilizing them in various legal applications, and have a keen awareness of the legal and ethical challenges posed by AI technologies. They will leave the course not only with theoretical knowledge but also with practical skills and a personal prompt library, enabling them to effectively integrate GenAI tools into their legal practice responsibly and innovatively.

Oversubscribed

We capped enrollment at 25. It filled immediately with about 25 more on the waitlist. Trust me, I know that it is the topic, not the instructor, that drove interest.

Spotlight

🔍🧐 A summary comparison of 5 GenAI platforms and their legal research capabilities

My friend, Carolyn Elefant, (who is deep into GenAI and a brilliant lawyer/business mind) shares a comparison of the following GenAI tools:

• Paxton Ai

• Cocounsel/Casetext

• ChatGPT

• Claude

• Perplexity

Click here to access.

AI Model Notables

► OpenAI releases GPT-4 Turbo

• Most of the focus for GPT-4-Turbo is on improving the life of developers accessing the OpenAI model through an API call. The company says the new update will streamline workflows and create more efficient apps.

• The new model brings the knowledge cut-off date up to December 2023.

• In the future, the model and its vision analysis capabilities will be expanded and added to ChatGPT, making its understanding of image and video more efficient.

• This is something Google has started to roll-out with Gemini Pro 1.5, although for now, like OpenAI, the search giant has restricted it to platforms used by developers rather than consumers.

► Amazon Bedrock gets Claude 3 Opus and is the leading marketplace for AI models for developers.

► Lawhive raises $12M to expand its legal tech AI platform for small firms

► Microsoft invests $1.5B in G42, the Emirati AI holding company based in Abu Dhabi

► PwC Tax & Legal and Lefebvre forge strategic partnership in AI using Harvey AI

News You Can Use:

➭ U.S. hotspots for AI jobs 👆👆

➭ The NSA and allied governments released best-practice guidelines for safely deploying AI systems.

➭ SAG-AFTRA union secures AI protections for artists in deal with major record labels

Who is the author, Josh Kubicki?

Some of you know me. Others do not. Here is a short intro. I am a lawyer, entrepreneur, and teacher. I have transformed legal practices and built multi-million dollar businesses. Not a theorist, I am an applied researcher and former Chief Strategy Officer, recognized by Fast Company and Bloomberg Law for my unique work. Through this newsletter, I offer you pragmatic insights into leveraging AI to inform and improve your daily life in legal services.