ROSS Intelligence, the Canadian legal research startup, recently posted an interview with Curo’s Chief Strategy Officer on its blog.  The interview was wide-ranging, covering Nicole’s unique dance style, her feelings on AI in the law, and her wish list for better legal tech products.  Here’s a sampling of the conversation:

“Much of the law itself is a rules-based system, so it was always going to be susceptible to automation. What we’re seeing now is the natural evolution of an industry as the available tools become more sophisticated and accessible. Expert systems have been around for ages, but we are seeing tools emerge right now that allow users to easily create their own expert system applications. We have every reason to assume that anything in the law that can be reduced to an expert system will be automated well into the future.

As far as machine learning goes, there certainly is a lot of opportunity there, but I think we’re just now wrestling with issues of algorithmic bias, what it means to be a lawyer and to provide legal services, etc. There has been a lot of work done in machine learning on more benign issues in the law, but it will get hairier as we go along. I think we’ll need to proceed with caution and be wary of these issues (as well as how regulations need to evolve to accommodate positive advances), but there’s so much opportunity to increase accessibility and, ideally, fairness in the system as this form of technology advances.”

You can read the full interview on the ROSS blog.