This module aims to:
• Provide students with hands-on experience of a contemporary LegalTech application or process so that they can develop a practical understanding of the opportunities and risks of using technology to deliver or enhance legal services.
• Help students to discover how looking at the way technology has transformed other sectors outside of law (e.g. FinTech, media, medicine) can help us to understand, predict or even design new types of legal practice and new types of ‘lawyer’.
• Demonstrate how established legal concepts and ways of working with legal problems are disrupted by machines with ‘artificial intelligence’.
• Raise students’ awareness of the commercial significance of artificial intelligence in an increasingly global, competitive and technology-driven legal services marketplace.
• Provide law students with sufficient knowledge and experience of artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand the capacity of those technologies to support legal services, as well as the accompanying risks which regulators are concerned with.
• Develop a disruptive, innovative mind-set in students that will enhance their employability within the new legal marketplace.

(LO1) Identify and evaluate leading theories on the potential role for machine learning, artificial intelligence and other ‘disruptive’ technologies within the legal sector.

(LO2) Understand the concepts of ‘machine learning’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ and evaluate the extent to which those concepts can be applied to legal analysis, legal reasoning, and legal decision-making.

(LO3) Identify the main current legal and regulatory constraints on the development of legal services enhanced by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

(LO4) Identify and evaluate selected critical and ethical arguments about the appropriate role of artificial intelligence in the legal sector.

(LO5) Identify and synthesise contemporary policy and strategy statements from government, the legal professions, and from the courts.

(S1) Critical thinking

(S2) Team Work

(S3) Commercial Awareness

(S4) Digital literacy

(S5) Presentation

Specific content will vary year-by-year and will respond to emerging developments in the field of technology, artificial intelligence and the law. General topics will include:
• Contemporary theoretical discourses on legal innovation, ‘access to justice’, and the role of technology and innovation within a competitive global legal sector.
• Fundamentals of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the context of legal services and legal decision-making.
• Understanding a contemporary LegalTech software application or process. In 2020-21 this will include the IBM Watson Assistant tool, but in future sessions students may cover alternative LegalTech including the IBM Discovery tool, NeotaLogic, or Kira Systems machine learning software. The precise application or process which students will focus on each year will vary according to technological developments in the legal sector and the availability of partners from relev ant LegalTech firms.
• Legal, regulatory and ethical constraints on the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the legal sector.
• Government, professional, and judicial strategies and policies for the development of AI enhanced legal services.

Teaching Pattern
1. Week 1
2. Week 2 - 2-hour seminar.
3. Week 3 - 1 hour lab class (PC centre/NetSupport School)
4. Week 4 - 2-hour seminar.
5. Week 5 - 1 hour lab class (PC centre/NetSupport School)
6. Week 6 - 2-hour seminar.
7. Week 7 -
8. Week 8 - 2-hour seminar.
9. Week 9 - 1-hour lab class (PC centre/NetSupport School)
10. Week 10 - 2-hour seminar.
11. Week 11 - 2-hour (Online assessed presentation seminar).
12. Week 12 - 1-hour seminar (feedback and reflective exercise support).

Module Delivery
Hybrid Active Learning - a combination of asynchronous and synchronous sessions for all UG modules. The general pattern will be:

• Students engage with set reading and recorded materials.
• Students will be assigned to teams in their seminar groups within which they will tackle a group project.
• Students will attend 2-hour seminars which principally cover issues relating to the law and the legal system.
• Students will attend 3 x 1-hour lab classes principally covering technical/computing issues.
• Students will be invited to attend Zoom Q&A sessions with 4 experts in the field of law and technology at different stages of the course.
• Module staff will supervise students’ project work within MS Teams, provide guidance to each team within their Teams space and attend Teams conferences within those spaces during extended office hours.
• All students will attend an extended final project presentation seminar (Teams or Zoom) in which they will present their own work and observe the presentations of 3 other teams in their seminar group.