May 8, 2025 • 27 mins
Abdi Aidid researches and teaches in the areas of civil procedure, torts, and law & technology at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.
He received his B.A. from the University of Toronto, his J.D. from Yale Law School and his LL.M from the Faculty of Law. Professor Aidid previously practiced litigation and arbitration at Covington & Burling LLP in New York City and most recently served as the VP, Legal Research at Blue J, where he oversaw the development of machine learning-enabled research and analytics tools.
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(00:16):
Hello everybody, Welcome to another episode of Studying Law
around the World. Today I have the opportunity to
be interviewing Professor Abdi Aid and we'll be talking about a
lot of exciting things. Really wanted to thank you so
much for your time and for the opportunity to be talking with
you today. Professor Oh, it's a.
Great pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting
me. You know, you were so curious
(00:38):
about everything and hopefully Ican sustain your interest
because I don't know if my storyis anything less than boring.
Surely it's not, it's, it's justvery interesting to kind of like
take a look at your bio and, andlearn a little bit about all the
work you've done so far. Practicing New York and Toronto,
leading research at Blue Jay andand also teaching at UFT and now
(01:01):
as a, as a visiting professor, if I understand it right, at
Yale Law School. Can you tell us a little bit
about your journey? Sure.
Yeah. So I grew up in Toronto, where
you now live, I guess, and I attended the University of
Toronto for undergraduate. And, you know, going to
university in the city you grew up in, sometimes you want a
(01:21):
change of perspective, a change of pace.
And so I actually went to law school in the United States and
beginning in 2013 and I graduated from Yale Law School
in 2016. From there I practiced law for a
couple of years at a firm calledCovington and Burling.
It's really a DC, Washington, DCbased law firm, but I was
working primarily in New York for them.
They have offices all over the world and I was working on
(01:43):
litigation, arbitration, all manner of dispute resolution,
mostly corporate, commercial types of disputes.
I left then actually for personal reasons, my mother
became ill and so I moved back to Toronto and I worked very
briefly. I described it as having a very
brief cup of coffee at a firm called Davies in Toronto, fairly
well known firm that is predominantly corporate and
(02:05):
transactional. But I worked in their very small
and actually highly impressive litigation department.
I mean, they were among some of the best lawyers that I
encountered in my career. From there, I left and tried
something very new, something entirely from left field, which
was joining us legal technology company.
Actually, I knew the founder andCEO Ben Allery earlier from many
(02:29):
years before that when I was an applicant to UC law school and
we met and he told me a little bit about this, this
opportunity. And so I joined Blue Jay.
And at the time, what Blue Jay was doing was using machine
learning to try to actually predict case outcomes and was
doing so successfully manner that was letting itself to use
by lawyers, accountants, etcetera.
So I joined to lead the legal research team at the time, which
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was a team of about four people,a lawyer and a couple of
research analysts. And by the time I left some
years later, it was a large team.
It was the biggest team in the company.
We had about 30 staff, includingmany lawyers, many research
analysts. And that was a wonderful
experience. Now, throughout that entire
time, I was teaching part time at UFT.
I was teaching legal research and writing, and then later a
(03:14):
large lecture and Civil Procedure and a small course in
arbitration. Around 2022, I joined the UFT
faculty full time as a tenure track professor.
And that's where you had, you know, we, I teach torts, among
other subjects, Civil Procedure,arbitration, and I'm also
teaching a course on privacy anddata governance in the Graduate
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School. So it's been a very lucky and
charmed career so far, and I take no credit for it.
I will say, to the extent that Iwas involved at all, it was that
I was open and curious for new opportunities and that that I
think probably accounts for mostof the the.
Round that's amazing and and thinking about all of this rows
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that you've had especially related to technology and
including the altering of a bookon the legal singularity as well
right I'd love to hear a little bit about you know thinking back
on your time as a JD student andthen having all of this
incredible experiences what are some of the things that you felt
that really shaped your perspective about what the
(04:16):
future of the legal professionallooks like and.
That's a great question. So I will say this.
I couldn't have imagined the possibility of working as the
vice president of a legal technology company or teaching
courses in law and AI, for example, while I was at JD
student, right? In part because what you might
call the proliferation of AI andin law really didn't begin at
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that stage. Even though I was in law school
relatively recently, it didn't begin at that age.
And so the idea of imagining a career in that space was a
bridge too far for me. So I don't want to give myself
too much credit. I wasn't, I didn't have that
kind of foresight. Instead, I was someone who I
think had very deep criticisms of the way that we do law and,
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and in the United States in particular.
What do I mean by that? Well, think about the, let's
call it the market misallocation, right?
You have a high number of peoplethat have unmet legal needs,
right? So you have people who cannot
afford a lawyer. And this is not just the problem
that the poor suffer from, right?
The poor have no hope of affording a lawyer.
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And maybe there's occasional government services that can
assist them and voucher programs, depending on the
jurisdiction they're in to help them get a, you know, legal aid,
whatever, whatever it may be. But if you're a poor person, not
only do you not have any hope ofobtaining a paid lawyer, so to
speak, but you probably have a limited choices.
But lawyers are increasingly critical for navigating our
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institutions in our society. You know, it used to be the case
that you maybe only needed a lawyer when you have a major
dispute in your life, right? Or when you're charged
criminally. Well, nowadays you might need
lawyers to communicate with tax officials, you need lawyers to
deal with landlord tenant issues.
You increasingly need lawyers todo things like a state planning.
If your, God forbid, you're in asituation where the custody of
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your children is at stake, then those that's not the kind of
situation where you want to go at it alone.
And those are still the big highstakes one, but there's so many
garden variety social activitiesnow that increasingly require a
lawyer. For instance, people are using
lawyers right now to reclassify their children into special
education streams and schools because when they want their
children to get extra assistanceat school and get individualized
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education planning, they have tonavigate a complicated
procedural process, right? And so lawyers are critical now,
the poor, the poor don't stand achance, right?
Then that can't be a just or equitable or ethical system
right? Now, I started by saying it's
not just a problem with the poorif you're a middle class, even
if you're at the sort of a bottom end of what we might call
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the upper middle class, the costand the expense associated with
a lawyer can get so egregious, can get so egregious that it
could bankrupt you. Certainly you're going to make
choices that you you wouldn't otherwise make.
It wasn't for the the that expense.
And for me, there's just something that I can't wrap my
head around, which is if law is critical as a guarantor of
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social rights, if it's importantfor us in terms of effectuating
our interest in society, then why is it that it demands these,
you know, very expensive intermediaries?
And why are those intermediariesstill expensive?
So I was very curious for a longtime about exactly what, what
justifies the high expense associated with lawyers.
And if you actually do some digging, right, you see that,
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well, part of what accounts for why lawyers cost so much is that
lawyers offer specialized skills, right?
They offer specialized skills that the market prices at X.
Well, is it possible that given that these skills are helping
people to navigate public institutions, to obtain
benefits, to resolve issues in their life, is it possible that
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we can replicate some of those skills in a cost effective
manner? And so I became very curious
about the role technology could play.
I just put a very fine, fine point on this.
In my years as a lawyer, from when I started until today, you
know, I'm still a lawyer, right?I was never able to afford
myself. I currently could not, could not
afford to pay myself the hourly rate that I would commend on the
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private marketplace. Something about that is
concerning, right? So one question is, can we use
technology to bring down some ofthose costs?
So there's a couple ways you cando that.
One way to do that is we can usetechnology to bring down the
cost by making lures more efficient.
If lawyers are more efficient, maybe they'll be able to pass on
some of the cost savings to their clients.
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Or they'll be able to change themodel from what you might call
them a margin model where a lawyer makes money on a given
case or matter they work on to amore volume model where what
matters is that they have they're able to service a lot of
clients and maybe they can bringthe cost that way.
That's one way. Or the other way is what you
might call retail applications, allowing people to access
technology directly to engage insome self help.
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So I became very curious about this actually really early.
So I didn't quite know that I was going to be the midwife for
these kinds of things, but I wasthinking about it fairly early
when I was seeing things like LegalZoom, you know, on occasion
I would need to deal with my ownsituations and figure out ways
to to, you know, self remedy, soto speak.
And so that was the beginning and end of my curiosity with
technology. And this is an important thing
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that I want to say. I'm not one of those people
who's interested in technology because I like gadgets.
You know, there's some people who are interested in AI because
they aren't set in all technology.
They're in the blockchain too, and they are interested in the
latest release from Apple or Samsung, right?
That's actually not me, right? I'm just a lawyer who's
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convinced that these things can be useful in limited context,
especially for this access to justice problem that I'm talking
about. And so I had a, let's call it a
diagnosis when I was in law school about some of this.
It doesn't seem to be working, right?
But I didn't have the prescription until some years
later when we started to see a Iwas showing us that we had some
(10:01):
capability of reducing those. Costs, well, that's so
incredible. It's it, it really sounds like
you've had lots of moments wherelike the, the reality of what's
going on in the day-to-day practice and then noticing
what's actually needed. There was a lot of like, we need
to do a lot differently. You know really this gap that
you've noticed, I guessing so many, many areas, right?
(10:23):
Yeah, well, let me say this, too.
In law, we haven't done anythingthat any other profession or
industry would recognize as innovation.
So think about it this way. Let's just do a little thought
experiment. Imagine a courtroom 100 years
ago. It would be exactly the same as
it looks today, except maybe today there'd be some screens
for evidence presentation and some laptops on the council's
table. Right.
A law school classroom 100 yearsago looked exact same as it does
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now. The class that you and I met in,
for example, would have been structured the exact same way.
And I, as a professor would havebeen standing up there largely
saying the same things, right. And so there's an open question
about that, which is, is it continuing to stay the way that
it is because we have a bedrock belief that it's good enough or
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that staying the way that it is because we're not critically
thinking about ways to make it better and new things that we
can do. And so that's part of the the
constant struggle of thinking about the improvement in the law
is why are we doing it the way that we're doing?
And you know, I have a hypothesis, which is that we've
created a situation right now where actually hard to imagine
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other possibilities because law has what you might call a
totalizing power, right? This is just to make it nerdy.
If you have, if you have read Claudio, you've read them,
you're gonna Habermas or something like that.
You talks about the law colonizing the life world,
right? The idea being that once law is
introduced, everything becomes law like, right?
Think about like a code of conduct at work.
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Once Upon a time, people would articulate a standard of
behavior for you in the workplace and say, you know,
Claudia, you better work hard and show up and do your best and
do right by customers and be good to your colleagues, right?
And there's ways that we can reinforce that behavior
socially, communally, almost even like a family.
Right now. It's the hypersexualized code of
conduct, which reads like a statue.
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And there's an enforcement mechanism that attaches to the
code of conduct. And there might be a grievance
process and there might be appeal after that.
And somewhere in the background is an Employment Standards Act
that governs all of it, right? And so, so much of our life, you
know, laws suffusing more and more of our modern institutions.
And so now it's critically necessary to evaluate whether or
not it's it's, we're doing things the right way, I think.
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And technology gives us that quote, UN quote crisis moment.
Right, that's amazing. That's such a dive into in a
little bit of the the history ofit as well.
But there is something that I think it's very interesting.
So I actually got to read the legal singularity when it came
out. I got you.
I was here in Toronto. I got to see the AI tax man
documentary followed a little bit of the events preceding it.
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And what I find interesting is that you mentioned a few things
that did not change largely, butthen there is the book itself
brings a lot of things that did change.
And it's especially how we classify information, how, you
know, the law gets put together,how libraries look like back in
the day, how much information you can have in a in a small
spot now. But I guess the main thing
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itself, it's the same, which is the content.
It just changed a lot of like how we deal with it, where we
store it and and how we go aboutit, right?
Yeah, so in the book we talk about these three eras of legal
information, right, The analog era.
The analog era is exactly what you know it to be.
It's, you know, books, physical media and all of laws contained
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in those things, right? And, you know, at the University
of Toronto, as recently as, I don't know, 20 years ago, we
were training students to conduct their research
principally by navigating the stacks of the libraries, right?
And what's interesting about that is that it has significant
equity implications, right? Because if law, if what exists,
if what we know to be the law exists in physical media, then
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who has access to physical mediamakes a difference for the
quality of the legal advice theycan give.
You know, there's a biography ofAbraham Lincoln who said that
Abraham Lincoln's legal practicewas limited by how many law, how
many books you could carry on his horse, right?
Which is true. It's interesting.
I mean, it's kind of a cartoonish way of making a
profound point, which is that solong as it exists in the
physical media that it's not so portable, then actually the
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quality, the entire universe of legal information is limited to
that which you can touch and see.
And of course, you know, same thing as today.
You know, the well paid corporate law firm is going to
have a better access to the information than the county
lawyer or the local lawyer or the public interest lawyer or
even the government lawyer, right.
So, but beginning around the 1970s, you have this transition
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out of analog into digital, you know, the rise of the computer
terminal, but also companies like, you know, W now Thompson,
Reuters or Mead, who created LexisNexis, right?
You get cool projects that come out of universities initially,
like the Queens University information computing project, I
think it's called Q UIC, now known as quick law, for
instance, right? You, you start to see law become
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available and retrievable. These digital databases, part of
what we argue in the, you know, you use them today can lead
Lexus, Westlaw, Bloomberg, whatever they may be, right?
Part of what we explained in thebook is that that shift from
analog to digital, even though it's a it's a shift from one era
to another, It's not that profound shit.
It's not the quantum leap, people say, because all it
really happened is the information that exists in the
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analog area became platform digitally, but it was the same
stuff we made the books and whatever cases statutes
available digitally, right? Today we're in what you might
call the computational error, where we say, let's take all the
information that was generated in the analog era platform to
the digital era, and let's treatit as data.
And now let's perform functions on top of it, right?
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Let's train algorithms to retrieve to identify patterns in
the information. Let's use now large language
models to generate yet new information from what it's
learned, for instance, in about the the semantics, the syntax
addiction, the structure of thatinformation.
Let's do statistical analysis. Let's use advanced data science
techniques to create new information, right?
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And so that's kind of where we are.
That's fascinating. I love you mentioned the book
and we're proud of the book, butwe submitted the manuscript, I
think like November 2022 and what happened that month, you
know, change GBT hit the marketplace.
Now we're observers. So we, we knew about large
language models, generative AI, we anticipated that these things
were happening. But it just tells you about sort
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of the rate of innovation here. Or when, when we first started
seeing AI image generation toolsin 2022-2023, you know, they
were putting noses on people's foreheads.
Today they could, they could trick you, you could, you could
think an AI generated image is areal person, right?
And so we've come that far and there are certain ways in which
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we're going to continue to improve.
But I think we know enough now to figure out that we need to
make some rules and figure out ways to absorb it culturally and
socially and become better educated about it.
All amazing. Thank you so much for your
comments. Really appreciated that.
And something that I that I wanted to ask you a little more
about got you listened to a few of the different interviews
you've given over the years. And something that you mentioned
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that I thought was just so interesting.
Is that an observation or maybe a personal feeling that you have
is really that AI will allow us to have more time to do a more
creative lawyering. So I think some of the arguments
you put out there was, you know,there's a lot of a lot of the,
the work that we do, the manual work, so to say, ends up, you
know, taking a lot of time. And then we, we don't go to law
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school thinking about, you know,writing a factum or, or doing
these things. Might we might think about
writing a fact to them, but we what we don't want to do is
spend hours and hours in the Westlaw universe, right?
Trying to find the one case thatstands for the one proposition
that the partner, whoever you'reworking for told you exist, but
you're now suspecting doesn't exist.
Right. Like these are the the drudgery
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involved in the legal practice are not things that we want to
continue to do. Or if you want to continue to do
them, you should feel free to dothem, but at least with the
understanding that there's more efficient uses of your time.
And for me, this is a critical social imperative.
It's not just about us having more fulfilling jobs of lives,
though I think that could be a byproduct.
I just think that we need to do things better, faster, more
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cheaply and more effectively, more accurately, because there
are people that have unmet legalneeds, right?
Emphasis on the more cheaply, right?
And technology allows us to get closer to that.
Now it brings with it other problems too, right?
I think the key thing in our book, the legal Singularity,
which was an optimal, I should say optimistic, it was, it
definitely advocated for the increases, increased use of AI
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in legal systems, right? But the subtitle of the book is
very important. It says how artificial
intelligence can make the law radically better.
And the keyword is can because it's not automatic that it will.
Why? Because there are still humans
involved. We can still do things.
We can impart our biases, we candiscriminate.
We can let this technology and Ibecome a runaway train.
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We can fail to adequately regulate it.
Or, and this goes back to your question, we can use it in ways
that don't reduce costs, but butallow us to extract higher
prices, right. So, for instance, you know, we
live in capitalist systems. There's there's a there are
winners and losers. There's also people that guard
information to their advantage. If you're a large law firm and
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you've had a strong market position for a long time and you
know that data is king in a world of AI, well, you're going
to create your own internal white labeled AI tool that's
going to be trained on your databecause you have privileged
information, You're going to have an advantage, especially in
areas for which things like caselaw are not published, like in
arbitrations, for example, They're firm.
(19:40):
That's the leading arbitration firm.
Why would you put cases back into the public repository if
you've been on the other side ofmost of them?
Why not just train your own internal AI and then suddenly
have an information advantage, right?
So I'm not, I'm not naive here in that I think it's
automatically egalitarian. We still have to make choice.
We have to legislate. We have to care about each other
as a, as a critical bottom line,right?
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And so I think that's the sometimes, you know, I talk to
people who are critics of the increases of AI because they are
concerned about some of the potential for misuse.
And I would say that's technology being layered on top.
Existing problems that we have, and there's are ways in which it
deepens and indeed amplifies those problems, right?
Think about things like discrimination, right?
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If there's racial discriminationfor a given immigration officer,
right, but that immigration officers cases, case histories
being used to train an algorithmthat's going to then make
immigration determinations, that's a problem.
But it's not just that it's a problem.
It's that suddenly the technology is more capable of
discriminating at a higher clip and with considerably more
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volume than that immigration officer themselves were.
So this amplification risk. So I'm not naive about this, but
I will say, and this is the critical point here, we can't
let technology take us off the hook either.
I gave the example maybe in class sometime about imagine we
had an AI tool that was setting our wages for the rest of our
lives, right. So forget no more negotiating
with your boss. He just you upload your resume
to some tool and it sets your wages for the rest of your life,
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right. That would without any other
interventions, it would project the gender wage gap into the
future. Why?
Because if it's based on all thehistorical data about wages, and
it would find that women make $0.79 for every man's dollar,
let's say, I don't know exact numbers, but let's say that now,
if that, if that happened, we would, we'd be in the streets
marching. We'd be like, you could not, you
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have to unplug this tech, right?Because if it, if it immediately
spit out the this woman gets $0.79 and a man gets a dollar
for the same qualifications, we would want to take a baseball
bat to the computer. However, the gender wage gap
persists socially. It's embedded in institutions.
It's exist in a diffuse way. It's, it's, it's embedded in
relationships. And there appears not to be the
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political will to completely, completely dismantle it, right?
And so we can look at the AI andbe like, Oh my God, we should
never use it in that context. At the same time, we can't take
ourselves off the hook for from not paying women more.
And so there's a way in which technology is both a masking
agent of some structural inequality, but it's also in
some ways a good, it allows us to bring the issues into stark
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relief, just almost like an empirical tool.
It's it's, it shines some light on some of the contradictions
that we have in our society. So that's amazing.
That's a, I really appreciate just you taking the time to have
this conversation because it's been so many different
interesting topics that you've brought up.
And if, if I were to ask you then, you know, we, we, we
talked about, I guess the practice of law, the information
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gathering, the social interactions that it had that,
that, that it goes along with. And I know that some of the
courses you teach are, are very much related to, to law and
international artificial intelligence.
So you know, when your students will come up and say things
like, I want to work with the law and AI, what do you tell
them in, in, in that prospect, If I may add to that question,
(22:55):
I've been, I spoke with quite a few people that work with
privacy law. And it's been more and more
popular since the European Union's regulation of, of
privacy and all of that. But before that, we didn't
really have privacy lawyers, or at least they weren't called
privacy lawyers. They were just lawyers that also
did a little bit of privacy and this and that.
And it just kind of like booms, right.
(23:17):
As far as careers, will, you know, a way that you know,
people were able to from my experience in these chats that I
had, people who were new calls were able to take positions that
beforehand in a previous market,you'd have to be a lawyer who
is, you know, working 10 years out in the market.
But because they're they're justwasn't a 10 year privacy lawyer,
then younger attorneys were ableto to get those positions.
(23:40):
So. Is there some kind of
opportunity like that with AI that?
OK, so here's the thing. I actually think that there's a
really good time to become a lawyer, right?
In part because of what we talked about earlier, which is
more and more of the grunt work is being automated.
And so this frees up some time to do interesting creative
things. And let's be serious, we came to
law school because we wanted to do going to problem solve, be
creative. We wanted to have a rhetorical
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flourish in the courtroom where we wanted to deliver justice.
We wanted to help people, right,change the world, so to speak,
right. So, you know, I, I think more of
your dynamism will be on demand in your profession, which is
really nice. The other piece of it is there's
all these new things now. There's all these things that we
couldn't exactly imagine. Same way I told you when I was
in law school, I couldn't imagine being the VA legal
(24:23):
technology company. Claudio, the job that you have
in 6-7 years might not be one that's invented yet.
You know, you might be a leadingtechnology lawyer, but the
technology that you're dealing with might be some newfangled
thing that we can't currently contemplate.
And so it's exciting just to wait and see in that way.
But separate from that, just thetechnology that exists today is
putting major strains on our legal system, right?
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What is what is what does intellectual property right now?
What does privacy at the moment?What does torts if every
autonomous, you know, every Tesla you see on the road that
has full self driving is a challenge to our traditional
negligence regimes, right. And so there's just going to be,
you know, sad to say, a lot of legal issues generated in the
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short term because of these technology that that actually
create, you know, to the extent they have a positive byproduct
to create cool opportunities foryou and me to to think about
ways that we can use our skills.That combined with the fact that
you can use the technology actually in your practice to be
more effective and more efficient means that you can get
good faster. And because, you know, you're
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entering A profession where people have, you know, we
talked, we started this by saying nothing has ever changed
your profession. That's pretty conservative and
in some ways baked into it. It's mold and is unchanging
unless it's forced to change. You can hit the ground running
and have a bit of an advantage by having some technological,
technological fluency, being able to leverage the technology
in ways that are responsible, but also being abreast of the
(25:46):
issues that it generates, Right.So I think there's great
opportunity there. You know, there's going to be
massive legal changes in Canada.You know, Bill C27, which was
going to revamp our privacy law and also introduce the AI and
Data Act, actually died in committee because of the
election, because of because thegovernment fell.
But it'll be back and that'll bea wholesale change in the
privacy law. And we used to have, you know,
(26:08):
PIPEDA, we still do, but it's it's on its way out, PIPEDA and
the Privacy Act. And, you know, there are lawyers
who made their career from having been on the ground floor
for that change a generation ago.
And so if you're someone who's interested in being useful to
your clients on the modern contours of privacy law, then
you should observe what's happening right now in the
Parliament with Bill C27 and learn about it even before it
(26:31):
makes it to getting royal assent, because you will be
ahead of the game. You'll be able to provide
important advice. And by the way, any company
that's worth their salt, that isserious about privacy law,
they're adopting, they're adapting their practices to the
new laws even before they pass. Right.
And so you have an opportunity to say, you know what, I have
(26:52):
this advantage. Like I'm someone who's inclined
technologically, there's substantive legal changes that
are occurring and I'm on the ground floor for it.
And so you you can, you can actually, you know, make a life
well, you know, from just they've been early in that way.
And so I would encourage students who are listening,
monitor developments, be up, be a relentless court watcher also,
(27:15):
right? Because the rest of us in the
profession, it takes a minute tocatch up, just a minute to catch
up. Yeah, fantastic.
I really wanted to thank you so much for your time for bringing
up this advice. I would.
I would talk to you. I would sit here and talk to you
anytime, even if we weren't recording.
I really appreciate you, Professor, and thank you all for
(27:35):
tuning into this episode and we'll see you on the next one.
Hello everybody, Welcome to another episode of Studying Law
around the World. Today I have the opportunity to
be interviewing Professor Abdi Aid and we'll be talking about a
lot of exciting things. Really wanted to thank you so
much for your time and for the opportunity to be talking with
you today. Professor Oh, it's a.
Great pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting
me. You know, you were so curious
(00:38):
about everything and hopefully Ican sustain your interest
because I don't know if my storyis anything less than boring.
Surely it's not, it's, it's justvery interesting to kind of like
take a look at your bio and, andlearn a little bit about all the
work you've done so far. Practicing New York and Toronto,
leading research at Blue Jay andand also teaching at UFT and now
(01:01):
as a, as a visiting professor, if I understand it right, at
Yale Law School. Can you tell us a little bit
about your journey? Sure.
Yeah. So I grew up in Toronto, where
you now live, I guess, and I attended the University of
Toronto for undergraduate. And, you know, going to
university in the city you grew up in, sometimes you want a
(01:21):
change of perspective, a change of pace.
And so I actually went to law school in the United States and
beginning in 2013 and I graduated from Yale Law School
in 2016. From there I practiced law for a
couple of years at a firm calledCovington and Burling.
It's really a DC, Washington, DCbased law firm, but I was
working primarily in New York for them.
They have offices all over the world and I was working on
(01:43):
litigation, arbitration, all manner of dispute resolution,
mostly corporate, commercial types of disputes.
I left then actually for personal reasons, my mother
became ill and so I moved back to Toronto and I worked very
briefly. I described it as having a very
brief cup of coffee at a firm called Davies in Toronto, fairly
well known firm that is predominantly corporate and
(02:05):
transactional. But I worked in their very small
and actually highly impressive litigation department.
I mean, they were among some of the best lawyers that I
encountered in my career. From there, I left and tried
something very new, something entirely from left field, which
was joining us legal technology company.
Actually, I knew the founder andCEO Ben Allery earlier from many
(02:29):
years before that when I was an applicant to UC law school and
we met and he told me a little bit about this, this
opportunity. And so I joined Blue Jay.
And at the time, what Blue Jay was doing was using machine
learning to try to actually predict case outcomes and was
doing so successfully manner that was letting itself to use
by lawyers, accountants, etcetera.
So I joined to lead the legal research team at the time, which
(02:53):
was a team of about four people,a lawyer and a couple of
research analysts. And by the time I left some
years later, it was a large team.
It was the biggest team in the company.
We had about 30 staff, includingmany lawyers, many research
analysts. And that was a wonderful
experience. Now, throughout that entire
time, I was teaching part time at UFT.
I was teaching legal research and writing, and then later a
(03:14):
large lecture and Civil Procedure and a small course in
arbitration. Around 2022, I joined the UFT
faculty full time as a tenure track professor.
And that's where you had, you know, we, I teach torts, among
other subjects, Civil Procedure,arbitration, and I'm also
teaching a course on privacy anddata governance in the Graduate
(03:35):
School. So it's been a very lucky and
charmed career so far, and I take no credit for it.
I will say, to the extent that Iwas involved at all, it was that
I was open and curious for new opportunities and that that I
think probably accounts for mostof the the.
Round that's amazing and and thinking about all of this rows
(03:55):
that you've had especially related to technology and
including the altering of a bookon the legal singularity as well
right I'd love to hear a little bit about you know thinking back
on your time as a JD student andthen having all of this
incredible experiences what are some of the things that you felt
that really shaped your perspective about what the
(04:16):
future of the legal professionallooks like and.
That's a great question. So I will say this.
I couldn't have imagined the possibility of working as the
vice president of a legal technology company or teaching
courses in law and AI, for example, while I was at JD
student, right? In part because what you might
call the proliferation of AI andin law really didn't begin at
(04:37):
that stage. Even though I was in law school
relatively recently, it didn't begin at that age.
And so the idea of imagining a career in that space was a
bridge too far for me. So I don't want to give myself
too much credit. I wasn't, I didn't have that
kind of foresight. Instead, I was someone who I
think had very deep criticisms of the way that we do law and,
(04:59):
and in the United States in particular.
What do I mean by that? Well, think about the, let's
call it the market misallocation, right?
You have a high number of peoplethat have unmet legal needs,
right? So you have people who cannot
afford a lawyer. And this is not just the problem
that the poor suffer from, right?
The poor have no hope of affording a lawyer.
(05:20):
And maybe there's occasional government services that can
assist them and voucher programs, depending on the
jurisdiction they're in to help them get a, you know, legal aid,
whatever, whatever it may be. But if you're a poor person, not
only do you not have any hope ofobtaining a paid lawyer, so to
speak, but you probably have a limited choices.
But lawyers are increasingly critical for navigating our
(05:43):
institutions in our society. You know, it used to be the case
that you maybe only needed a lawyer when you have a major
dispute in your life, right? Or when you're charged
criminally. Well, nowadays you might need
lawyers to communicate with tax officials, you need lawyers to
deal with landlord tenant issues.
You increasingly need lawyers todo things like a state planning.
If your, God forbid, you're in asituation where the custody of
(06:06):
your children is at stake, then those that's not the kind of
situation where you want to go at it alone.
And those are still the big highstakes one, but there's so many
garden variety social activitiesnow that increasingly require a
lawyer. For instance, people are using
lawyers right now to reclassify their children into special
education streams and schools because when they want their
children to get extra assistanceat school and get individualized
(06:28):
education planning, they have tonavigate a complicated
procedural process, right? And so lawyers are critical now,
the poor, the poor don't stand achance, right?
Then that can't be a just or equitable or ethical system
right? Now, I started by saying it's
not just a problem with the poorif you're a middle class, even
if you're at the sort of a bottom end of what we might call
(06:50):
the upper middle class, the costand the expense associated with
a lawyer can get so egregious, can get so egregious that it
could bankrupt you. Certainly you're going to make
choices that you you wouldn't otherwise make.
It wasn't for the the that expense.
And for me, there's just something that I can't wrap my
head around, which is if law is critical as a guarantor of
(07:12):
social rights, if it's importantfor us in terms of effectuating
our interest in society, then why is it that it demands these,
you know, very expensive intermediaries?
And why are those intermediariesstill expensive?
So I was very curious for a longtime about exactly what, what
justifies the high expense associated with lawyers.
And if you actually do some digging, right, you see that,
(07:33):
well, part of what accounts for why lawyers cost so much is that
lawyers offer specialized skills, right?
They offer specialized skills that the market prices at X.
Well, is it possible that given that these skills are helping
people to navigate public institutions, to obtain
benefits, to resolve issues in their life, is it possible that
(07:54):
we can replicate some of those skills in a cost effective
manner? And so I became very curious
about the role technology could play.
I just put a very fine, fine point on this.
In my years as a lawyer, from when I started until today, you
know, I'm still a lawyer, right?I was never able to afford
myself. I currently could not, could not
afford to pay myself the hourly rate that I would commend on the
(08:15):
private marketplace. Something about that is
concerning, right? So one question is, can we use
technology to bring down some ofthose costs?
So there's a couple ways you cando that.
One way to do that is we can usetechnology to bring down the
cost by making lures more efficient.
If lawyers are more efficient, maybe they'll be able to pass on
some of the cost savings to their clients.
(08:36):
Or they'll be able to change themodel from what you might call
them a margin model where a lawyer makes money on a given
case or matter they work on to amore volume model where what
matters is that they have they're able to service a lot of
clients and maybe they can bringthe cost that way.
That's one way. Or the other way is what you
might call retail applications, allowing people to access
technology directly to engage insome self help.
(08:58):
So I became very curious about this actually really early.
So I didn't quite know that I was going to be the midwife for
these kinds of things, but I wasthinking about it fairly early
when I was seeing things like LegalZoom, you know, on occasion
I would need to deal with my ownsituations and figure out ways
to to, you know, self remedy, soto speak.
And so that was the beginning and end of my curiosity with
technology. And this is an important thing
(09:20):
that I want to say. I'm not one of those people
who's interested in technology because I like gadgets.
You know, there's some people who are interested in AI because
they aren't set in all technology.
They're in the blockchain too, and they are interested in the
latest release from Apple or Samsung, right?
That's actually not me, right? I'm just a lawyer who's
(09:40):
convinced that these things can be useful in limited context,
especially for this access to justice problem that I'm talking
about. And so I had a, let's call it a
diagnosis when I was in law school about some of this.
It doesn't seem to be working, right?
But I didn't have the prescription until some years
later when we started to see a Iwas showing us that we had some
(10:01):
capability of reducing those. Costs, well, that's so
incredible. It's it, it really sounds like
you've had lots of moments wherelike the, the reality of what's
going on in the day-to-day practice and then noticing
what's actually needed. There was a lot of like, we need
to do a lot differently. You know really this gap that
you've noticed, I guessing so many, many areas, right?
(10:23):
Yeah, well, let me say this, too.
In law, we haven't done anythingthat any other profession or
industry would recognize as innovation.
So think about it this way. Let's just do a little thought
experiment. Imagine a courtroom 100 years
ago. It would be exactly the same as
it looks today, except maybe today there'd be some screens
for evidence presentation and some laptops on the council's
table. Right.
A law school classroom 100 yearsago looked exact same as it does
(10:45):
now. The class that you and I met in,
for example, would have been structured the exact same way.
And I, as a professor would havebeen standing up there largely
saying the same things, right. And so there's an open question
about that, which is, is it continuing to stay the way that
it is because we have a bedrock belief that it's good enough or
(11:05):
that staying the way that it is because we're not critically
thinking about ways to make it better and new things that we
can do. And so that's part of the the
constant struggle of thinking about the improvement in the law
is why are we doing it the way that we're doing?
And you know, I have a hypothesis, which is that we've
created a situation right now where actually hard to imagine
(11:27):
other possibilities because law has what you might call a
totalizing power, right? This is just to make it nerdy.
If you have, if you have read Claudio, you've read them,
you're gonna Habermas or something like that.
You talks about the law colonizing the life world,
right? The idea being that once law is
introduced, everything becomes law like, right?
Think about like a code of conduct at work.
(11:48):
Once Upon a time, people would articulate a standard of
behavior for you in the workplace and say, you know,
Claudia, you better work hard and show up and do your best and
do right by customers and be good to your colleagues, right?
And there's ways that we can reinforce that behavior
socially, communally, almost even like a family.
Right now. It's the hypersexualized code of
conduct, which reads like a statue.
(12:08):
And there's an enforcement mechanism that attaches to the
code of conduct. And there might be a grievance
process and there might be appeal after that.
And somewhere in the background is an Employment Standards Act
that governs all of it, right? And so, so much of our life, you
know, laws suffusing more and more of our modern institutions.
And so now it's critically necessary to evaluate whether or
not it's it's, we're doing things the right way, I think.
(12:30):
And technology gives us that quote, UN quote crisis moment.
Right, that's amazing. That's such a dive into in a
little bit of the the history ofit as well.
But there is something that I think it's very interesting.
So I actually got to read the legal singularity when it came
out. I got you.
I was here in Toronto. I got to see the AI tax man
documentary followed a little bit of the events preceding it.
(12:54):
And what I find interesting is that you mentioned a few things
that did not change largely, butthen there is the book itself
brings a lot of things that did change.
And it's especially how we classify information, how, you
know, the law gets put together,how libraries look like back in
the day, how much information you can have in a in a small
spot now. But I guess the main thing
(13:15):
itself, it's the same, which is the content.
It just changed a lot of like how we deal with it, where we
store it and and how we go aboutit, right?
Yeah, so in the book we talk about these three eras of legal
information, right, The analog era.
The analog era is exactly what you know it to be.
It's, you know, books, physical media and all of laws contained
(13:35):
in those things, right? And, you know, at the University
of Toronto, as recently as, I don't know, 20 years ago, we
were training students to conduct their research
principally by navigating the stacks of the libraries, right?
And what's interesting about that is that it has significant
equity implications, right? Because if law, if what exists,
if what we know to be the law exists in physical media, then
(13:57):
who has access to physical mediamakes a difference for the
quality of the legal advice theycan give.
You know, there's a biography ofAbraham Lincoln who said that
Abraham Lincoln's legal practicewas limited by how many law, how
many books you could carry on his horse, right?
Which is true. It's interesting.
I mean, it's kind of a cartoonish way of making a
profound point, which is that solong as it exists in the
physical media that it's not so portable, then actually the
(14:19):
quality, the entire universe of legal information is limited to
that which you can touch and see.
And of course, you know, same thing as today.
You know, the well paid corporate law firm is going to
have a better access to the information than the county
lawyer or the local lawyer or the public interest lawyer or
even the government lawyer, right.
So, but beginning around the 1970s, you have this transition
(14:39):
out of analog into digital, you know, the rise of the computer
terminal, but also companies like, you know, W now Thompson,
Reuters or Mead, who created LexisNexis, right?
You get cool projects that come out of universities initially,
like the Queens University information computing project, I
think it's called Q UIC, now known as quick law, for
instance, right? You, you start to see law become
(15:01):
available and retrievable. These digital databases, part of
what we argue in the, you know, you use them today can lead
Lexus, Westlaw, Bloomberg, whatever they may be, right?
Part of what we explained in thebook is that that shift from
analog to digital, even though it's a it's a shift from one era
to another, It's not that profound shit.
It's not the quantum leap, people say, because all it
really happened is the information that exists in the
(15:22):
analog area became platform digitally, but it was the same
stuff we made the books and whatever cases statutes
available digitally, right? Today we're in what you might
call the computational error, where we say, let's take all the
information that was generated in the analog era platform to
the digital era, and let's treatit as data.
And now let's perform functions on top of it, right?
(15:45):
Let's train algorithms to retrieve to identify patterns in
the information. Let's use now large language
models to generate yet new information from what it's
learned, for instance, in about the the semantics, the syntax
addiction, the structure of thatinformation.
Let's do statistical analysis. Let's use advanced data science
techniques to create new information, right?
(16:06):
And so that's kind of where we are.
That's fascinating. I love you mentioned the book
and we're proud of the book, butwe submitted the manuscript, I
think like November 2022 and what happened that month, you
know, change GBT hit the marketplace.
Now we're observers. So we, we knew about large
language models, generative AI, we anticipated that these things
were happening. But it just tells you about sort
(16:27):
of the rate of innovation here. Or when, when we first started
seeing AI image generation toolsin 2022-2023, you know, they
were putting noses on people's foreheads.
Today they could, they could trick you, you could, you could
think an AI generated image is areal person, right?
And so we've come that far and there are certain ways in which
(16:49):
we're going to continue to improve.
But I think we know enough now to figure out that we need to
make some rules and figure out ways to absorb it culturally and
socially and become better educated about it.
All amazing. Thank you so much for your
comments. Really appreciated that.
And something that I that I wanted to ask you a little more
about got you listened to a few of the different interviews
you've given over the years. And something that you mentioned
(17:10):
that I thought was just so interesting.
Is that an observation or maybe a personal feeling that you have
is really that AI will allow us to have more time to do a more
creative lawyering. So I think some of the arguments
you put out there was, you know,there's a lot of a lot of the,
the work that we do, the manual work, so to say, ends up, you
know, taking a lot of time. And then we, we don't go to law
(17:31):
school thinking about, you know,writing a factum or, or doing
these things. Might we might think about
writing a fact to them, but we what we don't want to do is
spend hours and hours in the Westlaw universe, right?
Trying to find the one case thatstands for the one proposition
that the partner, whoever you'reworking for told you exist, but
you're now suspecting doesn't exist.
Right. Like these are the the drudgery
(17:53):
involved in the legal practice are not things that we want to
continue to do. Or if you want to continue to do
them, you should feel free to dothem, but at least with the
understanding that there's more efficient uses of your time.
And for me, this is a critical social imperative.
It's not just about us having more fulfilling jobs of lives,
though I think that could be a byproduct.
I just think that we need to do things better, faster, more
(18:13):
cheaply and more effectively, more accurately, because there
are people that have unmet legalneeds, right?
Emphasis on the more cheaply, right?
And technology allows us to get closer to that.
Now it brings with it other problems too, right?
I think the key thing in our book, the legal Singularity,
which was an optimal, I should say optimistic, it was, it
definitely advocated for the increases, increased use of AI
(18:36):
in legal systems, right? But the subtitle of the book is
very important. It says how artificial
intelligence can make the law radically better.
And the keyword is can because it's not automatic that it will.
Why? Because there are still humans
involved. We can still do things.
We can impart our biases, we candiscriminate.
We can let this technology and Ibecome a runaway train.
(18:58):
We can fail to adequately regulate it.
Or, and this goes back to your question, we can use it in ways
that don't reduce costs, but butallow us to extract higher
prices, right. So, for instance, you know, we
live in capitalist systems. There's there's a there are
winners and losers. There's also people that guard
information to their advantage. If you're a large law firm and
(19:19):
you've had a strong market position for a long time and you
know that data is king in a world of AI, well, you're going
to create your own internal white labeled AI tool that's
going to be trained on your databecause you have privileged
information, You're going to have an advantage, especially in
areas for which things like caselaw are not published, like in
arbitrations, for example, They're firm.
(19:40):
That's the leading arbitration firm.
Why would you put cases back into the public repository if
you've been on the other side ofmost of them?
Why not just train your own internal AI and then suddenly
have an information advantage, right?
So I'm not, I'm not naive here in that I think it's
automatically egalitarian. We still have to make choice.
We have to legislate. We have to care about each other
as a, as a critical bottom line,right?
(20:01):
And so I think that's the sometimes, you know, I talk to
people who are critics of the increases of AI because they are
concerned about some of the potential for misuse.
And I would say that's technology being layered on top.
Existing problems that we have, and there's are ways in which it
deepens and indeed amplifies those problems, right?
Think about things like discrimination, right?
(20:22):
If there's racial discriminationfor a given immigration officer,
right, but that immigration officers cases, case histories
being used to train an algorithmthat's going to then make
immigration determinations, that's a problem.
But it's not just that it's a problem.
It's that suddenly the technology is more capable of
discriminating at a higher clip and with considerably more
(20:44):
volume than that immigration officer themselves were.
So this amplification risk. So I'm not naive about this, but
I will say, and this is the critical point here, we can't
let technology take us off the hook either.
I gave the example maybe in class sometime about imagine we
had an AI tool that was setting our wages for the rest of our
lives, right. So forget no more negotiating
with your boss. He just you upload your resume
to some tool and it sets your wages for the rest of your life,
(21:06):
right. That would without any other
interventions, it would project the gender wage gap into the
future. Why?
Because if it's based on all thehistorical data about wages, and
it would find that women make $0.79 for every man's dollar,
let's say, I don't know exact numbers, but let's say that now,
if that, if that happened, we would, we'd be in the streets
marching. We'd be like, you could not, you
(21:26):
have to unplug this tech, right?Because if it, if it immediately
spit out the this woman gets $0.79 and a man gets a dollar
for the same qualifications, we would want to take a baseball
bat to the computer. However, the gender wage gap
persists socially. It's embedded in institutions.
It's exist in a diffuse way. It's, it's, it's embedded in
relationships. And there appears not to be the
(21:47):
political will to completely, completely dismantle it, right?
And so we can look at the AI andbe like, Oh my God, we should
never use it in that context. At the same time, we can't take
ourselves off the hook for from not paying women more.
And so there's a way in which technology is both a masking
agent of some structural inequality, but it's also in
some ways a good, it allows us to bring the issues into stark
(22:11):
relief, just almost like an empirical tool.
It's it's, it shines some light on some of the contradictions
that we have in our society. So that's amazing.
That's a, I really appreciate just you taking the time to have
this conversation because it's been so many different
interesting topics that you've brought up.
And if, if I were to ask you then, you know, we, we, we
talked about, I guess the practice of law, the information
(22:33):
gathering, the social interactions that it had that,
that, that it goes along with. And I know that some of the
courses you teach are, are very much related to, to law and
international artificial intelligence.
So you know, when your students will come up and say things
like, I want to work with the law and AI, what do you tell
them in, in, in that prospect, If I may add to that question,
(22:55):
I've been, I spoke with quite a few people that work with
privacy law. And it's been more and more
popular since the European Union's regulation of, of
privacy and all of that. But before that, we didn't
really have privacy lawyers, or at least they weren't called
privacy lawyers. They were just lawyers that also
did a little bit of privacy and this and that.
And it just kind of like booms, right.
(23:17):
As far as careers, will, you know, a way that you know,
people were able to from my experience in these chats that I
had, people who were new calls were able to take positions that
beforehand in a previous market,you'd have to be a lawyer who
is, you know, working 10 years out in the market.
But because they're they're justwasn't a 10 year privacy lawyer,
then younger attorneys were ableto to get those positions.
(23:40):
So. Is there some kind of
opportunity like that with AI that?
OK, so here's the thing. I actually think that there's a
really good time to become a lawyer, right?
In part because of what we talked about earlier, which is
more and more of the grunt work is being automated.
And so this frees up some time to do interesting creative
things. And let's be serious, we came to
law school because we wanted to do going to problem solve, be
creative. We wanted to have a rhetorical
(24:02):
flourish in the courtroom where we wanted to deliver justice.
We wanted to help people, right,change the world, so to speak,
right. So, you know, I, I think more of
your dynamism will be on demand in your profession, which is
really nice. The other piece of it is there's
all these new things now. There's all these things that we
couldn't exactly imagine. Same way I told you when I was
in law school, I couldn't imagine being the VA legal
(24:23):
technology company. Claudio, the job that you have
in 6-7 years might not be one that's invented yet.
You know, you might be a leadingtechnology lawyer, but the
technology that you're dealing with might be some newfangled
thing that we can't currently contemplate.
And so it's exciting just to wait and see in that way.
But separate from that, just thetechnology that exists today is
putting major strains on our legal system, right?
(24:44):
What is what is what does intellectual property right now?
What does privacy at the moment?What does torts if every
autonomous, you know, every Tesla you see on the road that
has full self driving is a challenge to our traditional
negligence regimes, right. And so there's just going to be,
you know, sad to say, a lot of legal issues generated in the
(25:04):
short term because of these technology that that actually
create, you know, to the extent they have a positive byproduct
to create cool opportunities foryou and me to to think about
ways that we can use our skills.That combined with the fact that
you can use the technology actually in your practice to be
more effective and more efficient means that you can get
good faster. And because, you know, you're
(25:24):
entering A profession where people have, you know, we
talked, we started this by saying nothing has ever changed
your profession. That's pretty conservative and
in some ways baked into it. It's mold and is unchanging
unless it's forced to change. You can hit the ground running
and have a bit of an advantage by having some technological,
technological fluency, being able to leverage the technology
in ways that are responsible, but also being abreast of the
(25:46):
issues that it generates, Right.So I think there's great
opportunity there. You know, there's going to be
massive legal changes in Canada.You know, Bill C27, which was
going to revamp our privacy law and also introduce the AI and
Data Act, actually died in committee because of the
election, because of because thegovernment fell.
But it'll be back and that'll bea wholesale change in the
privacy law. And we used to have, you know,
(26:08):
PIPEDA, we still do, but it's it's on its way out, PIPEDA and
the Privacy Act. And, you know, there are lawyers
who made their career from having been on the ground floor
for that change a generation ago.
And so if you're someone who's interested in being useful to
your clients on the modern contours of privacy law, then
you should observe what's happening right now in the
Parliament with Bill C27 and learn about it even before it
(26:31):
makes it to getting royal assent, because you will be
ahead of the game. You'll be able to provide
important advice. And by the way, any company
that's worth their salt, that isserious about privacy law,
they're adopting, they're adapting their practices to the
new laws even before they pass. Right.
And so you have an opportunity to say, you know what, I have
(26:52):
this advantage. Like I'm someone who's inclined
technologically, there's substantive legal changes that
are occurring and I'm on the ground floor for it.
And so you you can, you can actually, you know, make a life
well, you know, from just they've been early in that way.
And so I would encourage students who are listening,
monitor developments, be up, be a relentless court watcher also,
(27:15):
right? Because the rest of us in the
profession, it takes a minute tocatch up, just a minute to catch
up. Yeah, fantastic.
I really wanted to thank you so much for your time for bringing
up this advice. I would.
I would talk to you. I would sit here and talk to you
anytime, even if we weren't recording.
I really appreciate you, Professor, and thank you all for
(27:35):
tuning into this episode and we'll see you on the next one.
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