Customer service is in decline. In my opinion, the problem is worse with large organizations.

I skimmed the surface in my last post “The Robots are Already in Control (Part One)“.

Companies that are primarily internet-based are the worst. One of my major pet peeves is a corporate website that has no phone numbers. For many, at best the customer service phone line is almost unfindable – buried four clicks into the site. I’ve even gone so far as to phone the “company” side of the business (the side that deals with shareholders), because there was no . . . [more]

Last week, as I was preparing for our joint Windsor Law and EPICentre conference “Disruptive Technology: AI and Its Impact on the Legal Profession and the Automotive Industry – What Path(s) for Regulation“, this article flew by:

Jackie Davalos, Dina Bass, and Bloomberg, “Chatbots Keep Going Rogue as Microsoft Probes AI – powered Copilot that’s giving users bizarre, disturbing, even harmful messages” (Fortune, February 28, 2024). The original Reddit post shows a variety of outputs that interested users received.

First of all, some of them did acknowledge that the whole thing could be a hoax. However, Microsoft’s response, . . . [more]

Good morning Colleagues!

La version française suit.

We are writing to you on behalf of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries AI Working Group (WG).

The WG is responsible for developing guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in legal technologies, including both commercial and non-commercial databases. The databases anticipated to be covered would be those that use legal information sources (statutes, regulations, cases, commentary, and other sources) as their primary data source.

At this time, we are soliciting feedback from the legal profession.

Your feedback is important to the process, and will be used to help frame our final . . . [more]

In my last blog post “The Robots (AI) Are Already in Control (Part One)” I reminded users about the headaches involved with system migrations. Our working lives are already controlled by technology. This was to set the stage for the next part of the conversation.

Before I go down that rabbit hole, let me say that I appreciate technology, but I am a late adopter. I’d rather let everyone else pour time and money into sorting out new technology issues, and then adopt after the kinks have been worked out. Automating my working life is a fun question that I’m . . . [more]

The robots are already in control. Having witnessed several systems migrations, I’ve been saying this for at least a decade.

Robots Gone Mad

Remember how the Phoenix pay system wreaked havoc on public servant pay back in 2016? Did you know that system has cost more than $2.4 billion? The problems persisted well into 2022. A full timeline for implementation was nicely set out by the Ottawa Citizen.

Now think about Ontario’s Social Assistance Management system. It cost over $294 million to build and fix after being implemented in 2014. Major issues were experienced as a result. . . . [more]

It’s been fun pulling together regulations and standards for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in legal applications over the past few months!

CALL/ACBD AI Working Group

Last fall, I proposed a working group (WG) through the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD).

Ultimately, the CALL/ACBD Executive did approved an Artificial Intelligence WG, whose terms of reference are on the CALL website. We are a group of 13 law librarians from across the country, representing a variety of interested parties, from firms, to academia to courthouse and legislative libraries. Our focus is primarily on AI in legal research and writing applications. Our . . . [more]

This submission is part of a column swap with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) bimonthly member magazine, AALL Spectrum. Published six times a year, AALL Spectrum is designed to further professional development and education within the legal information industry. Slaw and the AALL Spectrum board have agreed to hand-select several columns each year as part of this exchange. 

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a worldwide, standard taxonomy—adopted by all major vendors, firms, and clients—to make legal data interoperable? Well, happily for us all, just such a taxonomy exists. It’s called SALI. And this standard taxonomy/ontology . . . [more]

We’ve all been there, started typing a sentence without realizing our caps lock was on ONLY FOR IT TO END UP LOOKING LIKE THIS. Ordinarily, we’d probably backspace and re-type it, but what if I told you there was a handy feature in Microsoft Word which can change your sentence case for you in one click eliminating the need for deleting and re-typing?

Let me introduce you to the “Change Case” feature. IF YOU END UP IN A SITUATION LIKE THIS all you have to do, is highlight the text you want to fix, and then press SHIFT + F3. . . . [more]

Ever closed a browser tab accidentally and been unable to find it again? Sure, you could try to go through your browser history to attempt to locate it, but if you’re like me you likely keep your tabs open for days (sometimes weeks) at a time making a search through your history futile.

There are two ways that you can recover closed tabs. The methods vary between browsers and therefore, these tips will apply to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (sorry Microsoft Edge users!). The first method is to “Recover Last Session” or review “Recently Closed”.

In Google Chrome:

• Click

Do you have a particular portion of an e-mail or an entire e-mail that you end up sending repeatedly? It could be something as simple as a reporting e-mail or an e-mail where you discuss your fees. It could also be a just a single paragraph that you use often or even just a sentence.

Let me introduce you to “Quick Parts”. Let’s say that I always use the same text for my annual return reports to my client and I didn’t want to keep typing that out over and over again.

You can go into the last e-mail that . . . [more]

Ever accidentally wrote over a template or deleted a document out of a folder that you didn’t want to delete? Ever wanted to check what documents were in a folder on a previous date? Allow me to introduce you to the “Previous Versions” function in Windows Explorer.

The Scenario

You’re working in a folder with a bunch of disclosure documents in it. You’re working on reviewing them and deleting documents that you don’t need at the same time. In doing so, you delete a very important document that you didn’t intend to delete. This document was a PDF that was . . . [more]

Are you someone who uses e-mail filters to try and keep some semblance of organization in your inbox? Ever filtered too well and ended up missing an important e-mail because it skipped the inbox and got stuck in a sub-folder?

This tip will help you to filter your e-mails with confidence knowing that you will never miss an unread e-mail again. Let me introduce you to the “Unread” folder. This is a folder that you can create that can crawl all of your e-mail folders for unread e-mail messages and pull them into one common folder for you to view . . . [more]