Bill Hamilton, Senior Legal Skills Professor at the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
A 30-year veteran of Big Law litigation, Bill taught eDiscovery at UF Law as an adjunct for 10 years and now is a full-time professor at the law school where he teaches eDiscovery, complex litigation, and related topics. Bill founded the UF Law E-Discovery Project, which includes the UF Law E-Discovery Conference, now in its ninth year and scheduled for March 23-24.
Bill and I discussed the AI and Litigation Strategies compressed course that we taught from January 17-21 at UF Law to a class of 2L, 3L, and LLM students.
Key Highlights
- [2:09] Bill introduces UF compressed courses and the AI and Litigation Strategies course in particular.
- [3:19] Why offer a course on AI.
- [4:36] Other AI courses at UF Law and why those are offered.
- [6:42] The value of AI throughout the life of a lawsuit.
- [8:57] Opening oyster minds without crushing oyster shells.
- [9:50] Offering the students a hands-on experience with Reveal’s platform.
- [11:00] No longer rocket science.
- [11:53] Opening student minds to the many ways AI can help them as lawyers.
- [12:28] Finally a chance to show students how eDiscovery is a powerful tool for lawyers.
- [13:27] Bringing attorneys – and especially partners – back into the process.
- [14:42] The power of an AI-driven dossier to prepare for deposing a witness.
- [15:49] Any other courses like this one elsewhere?
- [16:43] A thank you to Reveal for helping make the course possible.
- [17:44] It’s not just one tool.
- [18:20] A bit about the students in the class.
- [19:57] Were oyster minds cracked open?
- [20:20] Key takeaways for the students: sentiment analysis, dogs and muffins, and more.
- [23:27] Lightening the heaviness of litigation.
- [26:13] What a new generation of lawyers can do with a new generation of tools.
- [27:36] Explaining TAR with Bill’s green and yellow boxes.
- [30:03] What next?
Key Quotes by Bill Hamilton
-
- “[We] have been talking this for many years, the use of technologies to advance and provide better client services, to increase the quest for justice which is what the litigation process is all about. That dovetailed perfectly this year into a tremendous initiative by the University of Florida generally to make our students all, across the board in every discipline, as digitally literate as possible, especially with artificial intelligence.”
- “Artificial intelligence – and what we mean by that is understanding your information better – is critical at the beginning of the litigation process all the way through the production process and into trial.”
- “The unsupervised learning as well as supervised learning … can slice and dice the data for me. It’s not like this takes me weeks or months to get ready for it. It’s built right into our systems now and its right there for lawyers to use…. It’s going to facilitate and improve the quality of the judicial litigation process and give us a better shot at getting a better answer in the litigation process.”
- “We didn’t just talk about it. We not only talked the talk, we walked the walk with Reveal. We had students in the software that Reveal graciously provided for our students and Reveal also helped build exercises for our students to do.”
- “What AI is doing, is it’s allowing attorneys to be involved in this process right at the get-go and to get their hands in the data. [The inability to do this] is what really frustrates attorneys.”
Connect with Bill