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The Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law is adding a new symposium to its roster, focused on how leaders can work with, not against, artificial intelligence in the legal field.
The school’s Center for International and Comparative Law will host the “Artificial Intelligence and the Law” event on Jan. 31 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
During the event, attendees will hear from several panelists as they share their experience with and research of AI at the intersection of law and other related fields.
Panelists include Frank Emmert, executive director of Center for International and Comparative Law and law professor at McKinney, who believes that in order to thrive in the field, lawyers must know how to roll with the punches that new technology swings.
He believes AI should not be seen as a threat, but as a helper.
“Your job is not going to be stolen by an AI,” Emmert said. “It’s going to be taken by a human using an AI.”
The motivation for the symposium, the first of its kind at McKinney, stems from a class Emmert taught last fall, which focused on AI and the law. As part of the class, students were given the choice to write a paper about AI as it relates to a legal issue of their choosing.
Emmert hopes many of the papers can eventually be moved to publication. The symposium is a launching point.
“As we were going through the semester and we were discussing these papers, and they said, ‘we should organize an event and present some of the papers to the public,’” Emmert said. “There should be a broader interest with the bar association, business executives, etc. here in town.”
AI as a global discussion
In addition to inviting students to present their work at the event, Emmert reached out to several colleagues across the law school and around the world who are doing research in AI.
This includes Max Huffman, vice dean of McKinney and professor of antitrust law. Huffman will join a panel discussing AI’s relationship with antitrust and regulation around the world.
Huffman’s research, which lies at the intersection of antitrust and AI, is a topic he said has been explored more overseas compared to here in the United States.
“Europe has been much more proactive in the regulating space,” he said. “They have what they call the AI Act in Europe, and the AI Act is a very, sort of comprehensive regulatory scheme about when AI is going to be used and not used.”
He sees Friday’s symposium as an important way to learn about how other countries are interacting with the technology, which is beneficial for the overall global relationship with AI for two reasons.
“One is that this is such a fast-moving, new technology that you sort of need as many different voices as you can get,” he said.
Huffman said the other reason is that, by definition, AI is not something that’s limited by countries’ borders.
“We’re dealing with digital technologies. Unless you go to heroic efforts to sort of segment off your internet from the rest of the world, what AI is going to be doing is going to be drawing information from and producing results that are relevant to every jurisdiction at once,” he said.
Legal professionals from Penn State University, Texas A&M, the University of Kansas, and Université Toulouse Capitole will join the discussion with McKinney students and faculty online and in person.
AI: The bridge between the law and other fields
Jessica Combs, a third-year law student in McKinney’s four-year, part-time program, will join the symposium’s panel discussion on AI in healthcare-related applications.
Combs’s paper, “Navigating Privacy and Progress: Regulating AI-driven Drug Development Utilization of Genetic Information,” leans on her background in biology and chemistry and her experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She said it’s crucial to understand genetic information, what she calls an individual’s “personal library,” and how AI will use it as the pharmaceutical field moves to develop better medicine for individuals.
Since AI is designed to handle large amounts of data, it can sift through information more efficiently. While this is something pharmaceutical companies will want to utilize, they also have to consider how to protect individuals’ genetic information in their work, she said.
“This is anonymous genetic information, so it doesn’t have people’s names associated with it, but we don’t know down the line if AI will easily be able to identify through just looking at the genetic information,” she said. “And if it’s being used by AI and the AI models talk to each other, can bad actors eventually access it and use it?”
Combs believes that while there are risks to the technology, the best thing to do is not to avoid it, but to get ahead of it as much as possible so it can be safely used.
“It is going to do a lot of good things, but we just need to mitigate those risks by working together,” she said.
Those interested in learning more about these topics still have time to sign up to attend the symposium. Lawyers attending the event can earn four CLE hours.
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