Quantitative methods are at once well-established and novel when speaking about access to justice. We’ve been reporting on our activities to funders, boards, and communities for decades, but we’ve also occasionally been complacent about what message we are conveying. When I think about data on the law and how we can approach using it better, I often think about Jon Snow and his search for the source of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. Here you can see the original map that allowed him to identify the source as the water pump on Broad Street, which he created through . . . [more]

Over the last few columns, I have focused primarily on the regulation side of my work in artificial intelligence (AI) risk and regulation. That focus has reflected, in part, my concern about the current regulatory patchwork surrounding generative AI in Canada and the very real dangers of unregulated implementation of AI into our daily lives. That discussion will continue at a later date, but for the next few articles I plan to shift the focus to the research and perspectives on the risk management side of the equation.

The risks associated with AI implementation are not hypothetical. Many readers will . . . [more]

In July, I was counsel in a voir dire in BC Supreme Court, where four police officers testified over three days. While the officers gave evidence, I took over 30-pages of handwritten notes. I could capture verbatim maybe 30 percent of what was said. The rest of the time — when answers went on for too long or counsel and the witness talked over one another — I got only the gist of it. Yet, precision was key.

At one point, we stood down for over an hour for the court clerk to go through the recording to find a . . . [more]

Author’s Note: After I wrote this column, but a couple of days before it was published, Open AI upgraded its GPT Chatbot from version 4 to version 5. Among the negative reactions to the change was a sense that ChatGPT-5’s artificial personality had becomes more distant and less complimentary. As you’ll see below, I don’t think that’s a problem. But there are early indications that Open AI might tweak the model again to reintroduce the earlier version’s “warmth,” which would make my warnings below more relevant again.

Something that many people have expressed concern about, when it comes to using . . . [more]

As humans, we tend to navigate the world through emotion: quietly, instinctively, and sometimes unconsciously. What are emotions, if not the very fabric of how we live in the world? They’re how we feel, of course, but are also how we communicate, often without even realizing it. They drive our decisions: in relationships, in politics and in marketplaces. They connect us to each other and shape how we understand ourselves. But emotions are also deeply personal. While our faces might betray a flicker of joy or sadness, only we know the full story; the nuanced reasons why we feel what . . . [more]

In previous columns, I have examined the evolving trajectory of AI regulation and warned of the precarious path ahead. Regrettably, I must now report that the regulation of artificial intelligence in North America has become a project stalled by political circumstance. In both Canada and the United States, efforts to establish comprehensive governance frameworks for AI have encountered untimely political disruption, legislative dissolution in Canada and executive reversals in the United States.

This confluence of events has left two of the world’s most influential jurisdictions without durable regulatory mechanisms to manage the profound legal, ethical, and societal risks posed by . . . [more]

In a prior post for Slaw, I argued that law schools should make AI more central to the curriculum. We should teach how to use AI effectively rather than resist it or pretend it isn’t there. To do this, we need to take a different approach, which might entail permitting the use of AI on some assignments and exams.

In this post, I want to address a strong counter-argument: encouraging law students and young lawyers to use AI too much, too soon will prevent them from developing the skills they need to do their jobs effectively—or even to be any . . . [more]

On December 18, 2024, the Supreme Court of British Columbia issued a decision in Clearview AI Inc. v. Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, 2024 BCSC 2311. At its core, the case involved a challenge by a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) company against a binding order from British Columbia’s privacy regulator. The company, Clearview AI, had amassed a large facial recognition database by scraping billions of publicly accessible images from the internet, many of which depicted individuals located in British Columbia, without obtaining their consent.

The decision is significant not only for its factual context, but for what . . . [more]

The market for legal AI is teaming with options. Many of them are compelling. All of them are expensive.

What the companies offering these tools hope that you don’t notice is that free (or almost free) tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are getting so good at basic legal research tasks that many lawyers looking to boost their productivity don’t need to look any further.

We highlight three ways to use these free tools to make research more effective — but we note that becoming a subscriber to one of them, for roughly $30 a month, will tend . . . [more]

I was recently speaking with someone about the Internet’s “Eternal September”, which is the concept that starting in 1993/1994 so many new users started using the internet that it could never settle into the online equivalent of November on campus, when people have figured things out where their classes are and where to get the sandwiches they like for lunch. From the perspective of 30+ years later, with no indication that the phenomenon has slowed, wearing a t-shirt saying that the internet was full in 1993 seems to lack, if not imagination, then at least prescience. However, the cultural . . . [more]

An email from a faculty member at the University of Toronto on the topic of AI made the rounds at law schools across Canada recently. It’s about using AI on final exams.

It points out that if a student has an app already open when they launch Examplify – the software most schools use to administer exams – they will have access to that app while writing the exam. This could be a browser with Lexis+AI or the app version of ChatGPT, which would still be online during the exam.

To avoid this, the company that makes Examplify advises running . . . [more]

One of the earliest projects that was launched at the University of Victoria’s AI Risk and Regulation Lab was a mapping initiative that tracked both how artificial intelligence (AI) is regulated and litigated. To date, litigation tracking has primarily been focused on cases arising from the United States and internationally as until November 2024, there was virtually no domestic litigation to discuss. That changed recently when two lawsuits were filed in the month of November, signaling that Canada is now joining an international surge of AI-related legal disputes. In this column I will briefly review the two recently launched cases . . . [more]