What’s New? September 2024

The King’s Speech The newly elected Labour government has had its hands full both on the domestic and international front since Sir Keir Starmer KC took office, but the King’s Speech gave some hints as to the direction of travel regarding technology regulation. Although the widely anticipated UK AI Bill has been kicked into the long grass, […]

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Data scraping for AI development

Machine learning and AI has been used in business for well over a decade and adoption of generative AI is now ubiquitous. As AI use and development reaches its teens, we might not be surprised that it expects freedom and wants to go in its own direction (in truth it probably already has) and that […]

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Challenging electronic evidence in court

The march of information technology continues and lawyers need to keep abreast of its reach and implications. The recent publicity attracted by the rise of machine-learning artificial intelligence, as well as the scandal of the Post Office’s prosecution of numerous postmasters and postmistresses, makes the issue especially topical. What do we mean by electronic evidence? […]

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What’s New? June 2024

First international treaty on AI The Council of Europe recently adopted a framework convention which aims to ensure the respect of human rights, the rule of law, and democratic legal standards, in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. The treaty is the outcome of two years’ work by an intergovernmental body, the Committee on […]

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The Post Office Horizon IT scandal: convictions quashed but the legal causes remain

In a previous article in the Newsletter, “The Post Office Horizon scandal: the law says computers are reliable”, I set out an outline of the facts leading up to the second trial against the Post Office by Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance set up by Sir Alan Bates, recently and deservedly appointed a Knight Batchelor in […]

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What’s New? April 2024

EU AI Act passed The European Parliament approved the Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) on 13 March 2024. It has been hailed as the world’s first comprehensive and binding piece of legislation on AI, although many of its provisions won’t be enforced for at least a year or two. Rather than attempting to regulate specific technologies, […]

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Copyright and copywriting: AI challenges

Since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, countless articles have been written about how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will improve the efficiency of white collar workers, including legal professionals, and perhaps eventually lead to job losses. Ironically, it’s the very people writing about the revolutionary potential of this technology who have been […]

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How ICLR is leveraging free law

The idea that the law should be freely accessible to all the people is nothing new, but it is technology that has enabled that aspiration to be realised. ICLR has taken advantage of that to provide, alongside its reported case law subscription service, a freely accessible version of both unreported judgments and legislation. Recent developments […]

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The Online Safety Act 2023: a primer

After a long time in the making, the Online Safety Act finally received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023. According to the accompanying Government press release, the Act “places legal responsibility on tech companies to prevent and rapidly remove illegal content” and aims “to stop children seeing material that is harmful to them”. So what […]

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Artificial Intelligence Contractual Clauses from SCL

The SCL AI Group have released their Artificial Intelligence Contractual Clauses document which is free to access and share under a Creative Commons Licence. The development and use of AI will increase significantly over the next few years. AI systems will therefore increasingly become the subject matter of transactional contracts. AI technologies create new and unique risks which will […]

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Towards a new benchmark of digital open justice

As reported here, in April 2022 The National Archives launched its Find Case Law service, and 6 months on John Sheridan of TNA described the progress that had been made. Meanwhile, ICLR systematically monitored the publication of listed cases by TNA over its first 12 months of operation. The resulting report, Publication of listed judgments: […]

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Generative AI and access to justice

It’s been almost a year since ChatGPT was released to the public back in November 2022. Although much has been written about the impact of generative AI on the legal sector as a whole, there has been less focus on its potential to improve access to justice for the ordinary citizen who cannot afford a […]

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