Artificial Intelligence Case Briefing Software to Assist Litigators in Writing Briefs
Just before the start of Legalweek New York excitement erupted when ROSS Intelligence CEO Andrew Arruda hyped the announcement of ROSS’s new product EVA. EVA uses artificial intelligence to assist litigators in writing briefs by streamlining the process of case law research by finding details relevant to new cases. The goal is to make case research, citations, and studies as easy as possible. Currently, this process can take days or weeks with standard keyword search, so ROSS Intelligence is augmenting keyword search with machine learning to both speed up the research process and improve the relevancy of items found. Included in the tool’s features is a drag-and-drop tool that allows easy uploading of a brief. After which point, EVA sorts through citations in the brief and isolates cases with negative treatment, also finding cases with similar language to the cases cited.
Though EVA is not the first AI of its kind—Casetext’s CARA is an AI research assistant that helps users discover and understand the cases they need—it started gaining media buzz when ROSS Intelligence announced an $8.7 million Series A led by iNovia Capital back in October of 2017. Just a month later ROSS Intelligence also announced a partnership with Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, allowing students to use the technology and understand its effects on the legal practice. Growing quickly, ROSS Intelligence has LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters in its sights for dominance over the legal research market.
EVA is available now on ROSS Intelligence’s website for free.
Uber Executive Will Testify to Senate on 2016 Data Breach
On Tuesday, February 6th Uber’s chief information security officer John Flynn will testify before a Senate Commerce subcommittee on the company’s 2016 data breach, which exposed the data of 57 million users. The hearing will focus on Uber’s reported $100,000 payoff to the hacker responsible through its “bug bounty” program, which is meant to pay hackers for reporting holes in the ride-sharing service’s systems.
Uber started the bounty program back in March 2016, encouraging hackers to find bugs that could lead to the exposure of user data—Uber would pay more for the discovery of higher risk bugs. When a hacker came to Uber with a high-risk bug for which he was paid $100,000, Uber’s security team celebrated its response to what could have been a major security breach. The question now is whether Uber executives ran afoul of the law when they made the payment and whether they should have notified customers or officials of their discovery.
The hacking is the subject of at least four lawsuits and attorney generals in five states investigating whether Uber broke laws on its data-breach notifications. The United States attorney for Northern California has also begun a criminal investigation on the matter.
Appellate Court Reverses Decision in Tinder Age Discrimination Case
The California Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit against Tinder accusing the dating application of discrimination against older users. The case was brought forth by Allen Candelore, who alleged Tinder was in violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act and Unfair Competition Law. Specifically, Candelore asserted that under Tinder’s variable pricing model Tinder charges users older than 30 $19.99 a month to use its premium version—Tinder Plus—whereas it only charges younger users $9.99 for the same upgrade.
Represented by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, Tinder argued that the difference in pricing was due to market research on the ability and willingness to pay an increased cost—the model was, therefore, more about income than about age. However, Tinder’s defense did not go far with the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, Division 3 who called Tinder’s reasoning “an arbitrary, class-based, generalization about older user’s incomes as a basis for charging them more than younger users.” In a line that has generated quite a great deal of media attention, Judge Currey declared in his ruling “We swipe left and reverse.”