A law firm recently reached out to me to conduct a CLE on Mental Health Challenges in the Age of AI. It was an interesting request. I’ve spoken about AI issues on panels, as a keynote speaker, and in the classroom, and I wrote about it for Tennessee Journal of Business Law. I also conduct workshops and CLEs on mental health in the profession. But I’ve never been asked to combine the topics. 

Before I discussed issues related to anxiety about job disruption and how cognitive overload affects the brain, I spent time talking about the various tools that are out there and how much our profession will transform in the very near future.

If you’re like many lawyers I know, you think that AI is more hype than substance. So I’ll share the information I shared with the law firm.

According to a  2024 Bloomberg survey on AI and the legal profession, 69% of Bloomberg survey respondents believe generative AI can be used ethically in legal practice. But they harbor “extreme” or “moderate” concerns about deep fakes (e.g., human impersonations, hallucinations and accuracy of AI-generated text,  privacy, algorithmic bias, IP, and of course, job displacement.

Those are

AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations

Calls for Papers

The AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations is pleased to announce two calls for papers, one for a panel presentation and one for a works-in progress session geared to workshopping the research and writing of junior faculty.

Panel Presentation:

Up to three paper presenters will be selected for the section's principal panel to be held during the AALS 2025 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. The program is entitled Technology's Intersection with Agency, Partnerships, and Unincorporated Associations. Co-Sponsored by the Sections on Technology, Law and Legal Education and Transactional Law and Skills, the session is designed to explore research and teaching involving the interactions of principal/agent relationships, partnerships, and unincorporated business associations with artificial intelligence, blockchains, cybersecurity, and other technological developments.

Works-in-Progress Session:

The section seeks paper proposals from junior scholars for a works-in-progress program.  Submissions for this session may relate to any topic within the scope of the law governing agency, partnerships, LLCs, or unincorporated associations.

Submission Information: 

To respond to either or both calls for papers, please submit a substantial abstract (five or more pages) or draft of an unpublished paper to

We just finished our second week of the semester and I’m already exhausted, partly because I just submitted the first draft of a law review article that’s 123 pages with over 600 footnotes on a future-proof framework for AI regulation to the University of Tennessee Journal of Business Law. I should have stuck with my original topic of legal ethics and AI.

But alas, who knew so much would happen in 2023? I certainly didn’t even though I spent the entire year speaking on AI to lawyers, businesspeople, and government officials. So, I decided to change my topic in late November as it became clearer that the EU would finally take action on the EU AI Act and that the Brussels effect would likely take hold requiring other governments and all the big players in the tech space to take notice and sharpen their own agendas.

But I’m one of the lucky ones because although I’m not a techie, I’m a former chief privacy officer, and spend a lot of time thinking about things like data protection and cybersecurity, especially as it relates to AI. And I recently assumed the role of GC of an AI startup. So

Greetings from SEALS, where I've just left a packed room of law professors grappling with some thorny issues related to ChatGPT4, Claude 2, Copilot, and other forms of generative AI. I don't have answers to the questions below and some are well above my pay grade, but I am taking them into account as I prepare to teach courses in transactional skills; compliance, corporate governance, and sustainability; and ethics and technology this Fall.

In no particular order, here are some of the questions/points raised during the three-hour session. I'll have more thoughts on using AI in the classroom in a future post.

  1. AI detectors that schools rely on have high false positives for nonnative speakers and neurodivergent students and they are easy to evade. How can you reliably ensure that students aren't using AI tools such as ChatGPT if you've prohibited it?
  2. If we allow the use of AI in classrooms, how do we change how we assess students?
  3. If our goal is to teach the mastery of legal skills, what are the legal skills we should teach related to the use of AI? How will our students learn critical thinking skills if they can

Depending on who you talk to, you get some pretty extreme perspectives on generative AI. In a former life, I used to have oversight of the lobbying and PAC money for a multinational company. As we all know, companies never ask to be regulated. So when an industry begs for regulation, you know something is up. 

Two weeks ago, I presented the keynote speech to the alumni of AESE, Portugal’s oldest business school, on the topic of my research on business, human rights, and technology with a special focus on AI. If you're attending Connecting the Threads in October, you'll hear some of what I discussed.

I may have overprepared, but given the C-Suite audience, that’s better than the alternative. For me that meant spending almost 100 hours  reading books, articles, white papers, and watching videos by data scientists, lawyers, ethicists, government officials, CEOs, and software engineers. 

Because I wanted the audience to really think about their role in our future, I spent quite a bit of time on the doom and gloom scenarios, which the Portuguese press highlighted. I cited the talk by the creators of the Social Dilemma, who warned about the dangers of social

I'm excited to announce this new position. It's particularly timely as just this morning, I had breakfast with venture capitalists, founders, and others in the tech ecosystem nurtured and propelled by the founders of Emerge Americas. This is a great time to be in Miami. Here are the details.

The University of Miami School of Law seeks to appoint an Inaugural Law & Technology Resident Fellow.  

This will be an exciting opportunity as the Fellow will join a vibrant community of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of law and technology. Miami-Dade County and the surrounding Tech Hub is enjoying a dramatic expansion in technology-related startups and finance.  MiamiLaw has an established J.D. degree concentration in Business of Innovation, Law, and Technology (BILT). Faculty have set up numerous technology-related programs including Law Without Walls (LWOW) and the We Robot conference.

MiamiLaw currently offers courses in: AI and Robot Law; Blockchain Technology and Business Strategies; Digital Asset and Blockchain Regulation; Digital Transformation Services: Business & Legal Considerations; Dispute Resolution; Technology and The Digital Economy; E-Sports; Electronic Discovery; Genomic Medicine, Ethics and the Law; Intellectual Property in Digital Media; Introduction to Programming For Lawyers; NFTs: Legal and Business Considerations

A few months ago, I asked whether people in the tech industry were the most powerful people in the world. This is part II of that post.

I posed that question after speaking at a tech conference in Lisbon sponsored by Microsoft. They asked me to touch on business and human rights and I presented the day after the company announced a ten billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Back then, we were amazed at what ChatGPT 3.5 could do. Members of the audience were excited and terrified- and these were tech people. 

And that was before the explosion of ChatGPT4. 

I've since made a similar presentation about AI, surveillance, social media companies to law students, engineering students, and business people. In the last few weeks, over 10,000 people including Elon Musk, have called for a 6-month pause in AI training systems. If you don't trust Musk's judgment (and the other scientists and futurists), trust the "Godfather of AI," who recently quit Google so he could speak out on the dangers, even though Google has put out its own whitepaper on AI development. Watch the 60 Minutes interview with the CEO of

If you are interested in business law topics at the intersection of law & technology and social inclusion, and if you are in NYC on January 25 (or just generally available that day for a webinar!), you may want to check out the Cardozo Law Review symposium on "Automating Bias."  The program agenda is included below.  Thanks to the symposium editor for bringing this program to our attention.

The symposium is being held at Cardozo School of Law, 55 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, with an option to attend by webinar. (The symposium editor will send a link to the webinar to all registrants closer to the event).  In-person and live webinar attendees can receive CLE credits for attending; no CLE credits are available for remote attendees accessing the program later in recorded form.  [Note: This last sentence has been revised from the version of this post originally published to indicate that live webinar attendees may receive CLE credit.]

Those interested can register through the Eventbrite page linked here.  Click on the image below for a higher resolution copy of the program agenda and speakers.

 

BLPB(CardozoSymposium2023)

We just wrapped up a fascinating discussion group titled "A Very Online Economy: Meme Trading, Bitcoin, and the Crisis of Trust and Value(s)–How Should the Law Respond?" as part of the AALS 2022 Annual Meeting. I co-moderated the group with Professor Martin Edwards (Belmont University School of Law). Here's the description:

Emergent forces emanating from social and financial technologies are challenging many underlying assumptions about the workings of markets, the nature of firms, and our social relationship with our economic institutions. Blockchain technologies challenge our assumptions about the need for centralization, trust, and financial institutions. Meme trading puts pressure on our assumptions about economic value and market processes. Environmental and social governance initiatives raise important questions about the relationship between economic institutions and social values. These issues will certainly drive policy debates about social and economic good in the coming years.

The group gathered some amazing presenters and commentators for the discussion, including:

Professor Martin Edwards (Belmont University College of Law) and I are excited to moderate a discussion group titled, “A Very Online Economy: Meme Trading, Bitcoin, and the Crisis of Trust and Value(s)—How Should the Law Respond,” at the 2022 American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting. The discussion group is scheduled to take place (virtually) on Friday, January 7, 2022. We welcome responses to the call for participation (here). Here’s the description:

Emergent forces emanating from social and financial technologies are challenging many underlying assumptions about the workings of markets, the nature of firms, and our social relationship with our economic institutions. The 21st century economy and financial architecture are built on faith and trust in centralized institutions. Perhaps it is not surprising that in 2008, a time where that faith and trust waned, a different architecture called “blockchain” emerged. It promised “trustless” exchange, verifiable intermediation, and “decentralization” of value transfer.

In 2021, the financial architecture and its institutions suffered a broadside from socialmedia-fueled “meme” and “expressive” traders. It may not be a coincidence that many of these traders reached adulthood around 2008, when the crisis called into question whether that real money, those real securities, or that