Attorneys across the state of New York are already finding innovative ways to utilize AI-powered legal analytics to develop data-driven forecasts about virtually every aspect of the legal industry.
Across the state of New York, new legal technologies continue to transform the legal sector, provoking waves of anxiety about the future of the legal profession. These waves were felt at the New York State Bar Association Annual Meeting in New York City earlier this year. The forum hosted a session titled “Emerging Technologies in Litigation,” the purpose of which was to discuss the changing role of technology in the courtroom—particularly the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Participants learned that AI is already a fairly well-established phenomenon in the legal sector, even if attorneys have never interfaced with a legal tech product directly. Consider the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) program. According to one participant, the Hon. Melissa Crane of the New York City Civil Court, COMPAS uses AI in a risk assessment program, a tool that makes decisions about the kind of supervision an offender will receive. These decisions are based on an AI-algorithm that weighs the personal characteristics of an offender as well as their responses to specific questions. There is just one small problem. Algorithms don’t always work. Right?
Nicole Clark
Prior to founding Trellis, Nicole Clark was a business litigation and labor and employment attorney who handled litigation in both state and federal courts. She regularly represented multinational corporations in claims ranging from high-profile trade secret disputes to complex class-action litigation. Frustrated by sending internal emails and collecting anecdotes on judges in order to make strategic case recommendations, she built Trellis to solve her own need for access to data, information, and analytics at the state trial court level. Prior to law school, Nicole attended Bard College, beginning her college coursework at the age of sixteen. She graduated with honors from University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BA in Journalism, and received her Juris Doctorate from Rutgers School of Law in Newark, NJ. Nicole sat for the Bar Exam in California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and remains licensed to practice law in all three states.