Alexa in the law office is a Bad idea.

One of my favorites shows to watch on television as a kid was Hogan's Heros. My how it amused me as time and again the misfit prisoners befuddled the hapless Nazis. One of my favorite bits was when Hogan and the boys would gather round the coffee pot that they had transformed into a receiver, to listen in on the bug they had placed in Colonel Klink's office. The intel gathered from that bug -- at least by Hollywood standards -- doomed the war for the Germans.

Guess what? If you have an Amazon Echo (commonly referred to as Alexa) in your law office, you are as vulnerable as Colonel Klink, and possibility violating your duty of attorney-client privilege to your clients.

Alexa is a powerful electronic device (along with its Google cousin Google Home, and others in the commerce pipe....). It is on all the time. It is listening all the time. It is processing all the time. No my dear friend it is not just on when you say the prompt word "alexa"). It must be on and listening at all times to hear that alexa prompt, and then rise to its next level of response. Once that magic word is spoken, Alexa really turns on the hearing. And she does not always stop. I have found that with my Echo (which is not in my law office) I have to frequently tell her "alexa off" or "alexa stop" to make that blue listening ring go off. While Amazon has never said as much, rumors are that all the sounds going in to every Alexa device world-wide are stored digitally on Amazon's servers. Giving a third party an invitation to record the privileged conversations occurring in your law office should give you pause to think about your possible breach of your attorney-client privilege. Consider this: audio recordings collected by an Alexa device have already been used as evidence in a murder case. They are hearing a lot!

Appreciate also that Alexa runs over your wi-fi network. If there are security breaches in your wi-fi, those vulnerabilities extend to Alexa. I remember watching a demonstration on television once by a hacker who was able to breach a wi-fi network, and then sit there while his computer acted as a mirroring screen for the computer that he had hacked. The same could easily enough happen with Alexa. If breached, she could become the bug in Colonel Klink's office, providing a stereo broadcast of everything said in your law office.

The device itself is also vulnerable. Last week the Amazon network went down so that Alexa devices could not talk back to their owners. They were still listening mind you and recording, but you would have never known it because she could not respond to what she heard and that blue recording circle was not illuminating. As more Alexa devices proliferate, you can be sure that hackers will accept the challenge and find ways to break-in.

Don't get me wrong, I Love my Alexa. But there is a right time and place for everything, and wrong time and place for everything. There is never a right time to have an Alexa in your law office.

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

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Creating a Process for Translation During the Legal Discovery Process

One of the most essential parts of fair procedure and due process in a trial is the pre-trial discovery. Legal teams on both sides of the case are legally obligated to share and exchange all relevant documentation in an effort to avoid “trial by ambush”.

The concept of pre-trial discovery is becoming more and more difficult, though. With the growth of cross-border litigation in our vastly global economy coming to an all-time high, discovery has become a lot more complex.

During discovery, dealing with multilingual documents makes the entire process much more laborious. This can affect collecting, filtering, reviewing, and processing all of the various documents. One of the best ways to handle these multilingual documents is by following a decision-making algorithm for legal translation that you can use to complete your discovery efficiently and accurately.

What’s the volume of the discovery documents you’re looking through?

You can determine how you’ll handle your multilingual discovery documents based on how many legal documents you have to translate. For smaller volumes of discovery documents that hold less than 1000 words for translation into maximum two languages, the smart course of action would be to choose a full legal document translation that translates every page.

This would be done by hiring a human translator who has a legal background or subject matter expertise in the legal field so that they can accurately translate the source text.

Alternatively, if you need to translate higher volumes of discovery documents, full human translation can often be too expensive. Instead, you can partner with a professional translation company so that they can filter through the documents and identify a smaller subset of those documents to engage in full human translation. These professional translation services usually relies on two key options: machine translation and foreign language document review.

Machine translation

Machine translation works like this:

1. Scan, OCR (optical character recognition), and index all of the documents. These are then fed through a machine translator so that the translation company can determine the “overview” of each document and what it contains.
2. Your internal legal team goes over all of the documents that went through the machine translator to figure out which ones are the most relevant to the case.
3. All of the documents that were deemed relevant will then be translated word-for-word by a qualified legal translator

Foreign language document review

For foreign language document reviews, the usual process is:

1. The translation agency you hire will get onsite reviewers to determine which documents are relevant to the case by applying legal principles of privilege. These onsite reviewers are usually professional translators with legal expertise or multilingual attorneys.
2. This step is optional: For documents that are difficult to discern whether they are relevant or not, onsite reviewers can prepare summaries for review by the internal legal team in an oral or written form.
3. Once the set of documents have been finalized and approved as relevant to the case, they undergo full document translation by qualified human translators.

Choosing a combination of machine learning and foreign language document review is the most cost-effective approach when dealing with multilingual documents in discovery. Document types that have a higher chance of being central to the case – such as meeting protocols, contracts, or agreements – might be chosen to go through a more intensive foreign language document review. Meanwhile, the rest of the documents can go the machine translation route. Striking a strong balance between the two options and instituting a decision-making algorithm for deciding will earn you better results in your cross-border cases.

By Sirena Rubinoff is the Content Manager at Morningside Translations. She earned her B.A. and Master’s Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. After completing her graduate degree, Sirena won an international fellowship as a Rotary Cultural Ambassador to Jerusalem. Sirena covers topics related to software and website localization, global business solutions, and the translation industry as a whole.

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

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Tech Is Gonna Help You to Know Your Judge

To this day -- 30 years later -- I remember a story my law school civil procedure professor told us about his first attorney job. 20 years earlier he had been hired by a prominent Wall Street firm. He was assigned to a team for work on an appeal to a U.S. Court of Appeal. For three weeks his only task was to research the lives and histories of the justices assigned to the case. Not just their written opinions, but where they went to school, who they were married to, what their children were about, what kind of food they ate. What size shoe they wore... That level of intel gathering impressed me.  The need to know your judge stuck with me.

I am a firm believer that it is only good lawyering to learn as much as you can about the judge you are litigating in front of. Venture capital and the artificial intelligence world agree with me, and their help is on the way.

Gavelytics is a start-up that focuses on gathering info about, and predicting rulings of, the judges
you are going in front of -- even in simple old family law.

Right now Gavelytics is limited to LA County and Riverside County, but that will change. It is also light on, but not without, family law judges. The user interface is pretty cool. The landing page for each judge includes where they are, who they work with, how you contact them, where they went to school, how they got to the bench. Take a look:

Click the image for a larger look

There's more. Here are some of the Gavelytics tools:

• Judicial Workload
• Learn how long it takes to get to trial, the average delay between complaint filing and the initial CMC, and average case length, all compared to the jurisdictional average.
• Gavelscore
• Discover whether a judge has ruled more often for plaintiffs or defendants in bench trials. No more guesswork about a judge's most important decisions.
• Motion Analyzer
• See how a judge has ruled on 100+ different types of California motions, including summary judgment, demurrers, and motions to compel.
• Motion Details
• Compare a judge's motion ruling tendencies to the jurisdictional average, providing crucial context so you can determine if your judge is an outlier–and what to do about it.
• Learn how often parties make CCP § 170.6 filings against your judge
• Take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds and see how often other parties paper your judge, all searchable by filing party and case type.
• See crucial judge ruling and docket speed data in a single dashboard
• The Judge Summary
• Takes the most important judicial data points, like tendencies on summary judgment motions, discovery motions and docket speed, and puts them in a simple dashboard for easy reference.

What's it cost? $35 to $65 per month. Not bad. This is a technology that I am going to have to keep my eye on....

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

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AI Is The New Craze!

Artificial intelligence, "AI", seems to be everywhere in the law practice discussion. But what is it? I don't really know? To resolve my lack of clarity I have been looking for the definitive summary. That has been a struggle. Much like the King's new clothes, there is plenty of buzz, but little explanation.

Above The Law is investing lots of virtual ink on the topic, and has become a preferred learning center. One article in particular that I found useful is Sterling Miller's Artificial Intelligence And Its Impact On Legal Technology. As Miller explains, AI is:

[T]eaching computers how to learn, reason, communicate, and make decisions. Cognitive tools are trained vs. programmed — learning how to complete tasks traditionally done by people, where the focus is looking for patterns in data, testing the data, and finding/providing results. Or, as I like to think about it, a research assistant who can sift through the deck and tell you what it found.

Law Technology Today gives us another explanation:

Artificial intelligence, or AI, refers to computer software and systems that don’t just do tasks they’ve been programmed for in advance—they actually learn as they go, improving their performance through feedback. These programs can quickly learn to complete data-intensive tasks that were previously relegated to bored and weary humans. By recognizing patterns in the relationships between words or data points, computers learn how to identify relevant information, recognize mistakes, and spot inconsistencies—all faster, and usually better, than humans do.

Okay, I kind of get it. But how is AI utilized by lawyers? That also seems to be a nebulous question. Here's more golden nuggets from Above The Law:

If you’ve used Google to find a song with just a few words from a lyric or searched Netflix to pick out a comedy that’s safe to watch with kids, you have used applied machine learning. Machine learning is an area of artificial intelligence that enables computers to self-learn, without being explicitly programmed, to look for specific pieces of information. 

When lawyers use machine learning for discovery or internal investigations, it’s commonly called technology assisted review (TAR) or predictive coding. Although TAR has been around for a while, lawyers and litigation support professionals still have questions about how to best use it on individual cases.

Okay, we have a vague description of AI. What are some of the actual applications for legal practitioners?  More from Legal Technology Today:

The primary areas where AI is being applied in the law, so far, include the following broad categories: 

• review of documents for discoverable or otherwise relevant information, generally referred to as technology-assisted review (TAR).

• legal research through automated searches of a universe of case law and statutes.

• contract and legal document analysis.

• proofreading, error correction, and document organization.

There's still plenty to learn, but is is obvious the dialogue has started.  Is it too early for family law lawyers to get on board? Of course not. Large marital estate generate lots of data for divorce. If I am understanding AI, the tools that are developing could be quite useful to us in wrangling all of the information and date more efficiently and effectively. We need to pay attention to this topic as family law practice continues to evolve beyond just the evolving statutes and case law.

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

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