Lies. Scams. Disinformation. Misinformation. Voice cloning. Likeness cloning. Deepfakes. Manipulated photographs. Manipulated videos. They all pose tough questions for lawyers, judges and juries.AI has exploded the possibilities of all these things to the point that it’s almost impossible to trust anything. Lack of trust has enormous implications for lawyers, judges, and the way we resolve disputes. Authentication can no longer be assumed. It is no longer the tail wagging the proverbial dog. It may be the dog.

Here’s my post for Above the Law on this issue after attending a CES panel discussion.

60 Minutes, the CBS weekly news show, did a segment this past Sunday on the powers of so-called deepfakes. Deepfakes refers to the use of AI to alter how a person looks or sounds on video. It can also be used to make one person appear to be and sound like another.

 

According to Wikipedia. Deepfakes (a combination of “deep learning” and “fake”) are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image on a video is simply replaced with someone else’s likeness. Deepfakes use machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate both visual and audio content.

Continue Reading Deepfakes and the Litigation Risk

Back in the 1970s, there was a television commercial featuring jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald with a wine glass, a recording studio, and a recordable audio cassette made by a company called Memorex. The pitch was that the audio recording of Ella’s voice could break the wine glass, just like her live voice. The tagline was, “Is it live or Memorex?”

Continue Reading Is it Real or Is It Fake? The Emerging Challenges of Authenticating Digital Evidence in Courtrooms

Avocado teapots. Cats playing chess. How new technology mandates a level of judicial technological competence and understanding. 

 

Bluntly put, judges exist to serve litigants who have disputes. The business of the judiciary is to facilitate the resolution of disputes–whether the dispute is resolved by the judge, a jury or through settlement. Judges are in a service business: like every other service business these days, judges need some basic familiarity and understanding of relevant technology.

 

.A new technology caught my eye last week that drives this point home. DALL-E, a technology that lets you create digital images by typing in what you want to see, was discussed in a recent New York Times article by Cade Metz. The technology was developed by an outfit called OpenAI, which is backed by a billion dollars in funding from Microsoft. According to OpenAI, DALL-E is “trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs”. It is a “new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”

Continue Reading To Serve Their Customers, Judges Need To Understand Technology

It’s a wrap. CES 2025 is finally over. Here’s my post for Above the Law summarizing my ten top takeaways in general. And the three things I think may most impact legal over the next year or so: the advent of AI agents, deepfakes and how AI will affect law firm managment and supervsion of lawyers and legal professionals.

BriefCatch yesterday announced the launch of BriefCatch 3 to help legal professionals improve legal writing. The new version makes BriefCatch available for the first time to Mac users, features real-time editing, a rebuilt rules engine, enhanced Natural Language Processing and AI, and more.

 

According to the Press Release, BriefCatch now offers more than 11,000 on-demand, legal-specific writing suggestions. These recommendations will help lawyers make more persuasive arguments. It can also help judges write better opinions.

Continue Reading BriefCatch and Ross Guberman: Three Important Insights