CodeX Archives - IPOsgoode /osgoode/iposgoode/tag/codex/ An Authoritive Leader in IP Fri, 13 Jan 2023 17:00:00 +0000 en-CA hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 The Power of Immersion: My Internship at the Stanford Centre for Legal Informatics /osgoode/iposgoode/2023/01/13/the-power-of-immersion-my-internship-at-the-stanford-centre-for-legal-informatics/ Fri, 13 Jan 2023 17:00:00 +0000 https://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=40436 The post The Power of Immersion: My Internship at the Stanford Centre for Legal Informatics appeared first on IPOsgoode.

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Androu Waheeb is an IP Innovation Clinic Coordinator and a 3L JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. This article was written as a requirement for Prof. Pina D’Agostino’s IP Intensive Program.


CodeX: The Epitome of Legal Innovation

I was incredibly fortunate to have been placed at CodeX, the multidisciplinary legal informatics team at Stanford University. The team connects talented computer scientists with expert lawyers to find technological solutions for pressing access to justice dilemmas. During my rotation, the team was committed to developing a platform that would enable the democratization of insurance contracts. Naturally, many of the conversations centred around exploring technical solutions for technical problems and strategic decision-making.

Starting at the Very Beginning

Despite being someone that prides himself on a level of self-cultivated technical savvy and familiarity, my lack of formal engineering and computer science training became immediately obvious. The technical aspects of artificial intelligence, logic programming, deep learning, and computable contracts eluded me. I was way out of my league, and I knew it. I had much to learn to be able to understand the team’s concerns and become useful.

Every member of the CodeX team offered to schedule a meeting with me to explain their work and teach me everything I needed to understand. I enthusiastically took them up on their offers and am extremely grateful to the whole team for their time and effort. I learned the basics of deep learning and logic programming. Armed with my new knowledge, I attended every technical meeting and immersed myself in the team’s work. When I understood the technology and the predicaments the team faces daily, I came to a fundamental realization. The roots of some of the biggest technical complications were the classical legal conundrums that legal professionals continue to struggle with as well.

Dilemma 1: Precision vs Elasticity

First, computer language is necessarily surgically precise and explicit. Thereby, the utilization of technology is predicated on the ability to translate legal documents into precise rules that the computer can understand and manipulate. For computable contracts, every clause of each contract must be coded using logic programming. However, contract interpretation is an art. It requires the interpreter to grapple with inherent linguistic elasticity and ambiguity that produces opposing but plausible outcomes. This is a problem that lawyers are very familiar with. Courts usually grapple with this by retroactively exploring the contractual language for a juncture at which the reasonable minds of the parties met while operating within the bounds of justice, public policy, established legal doctrines, and statutory law. Simulating this process is a challenging feat.

Dilemma 2: Free Public Access vs Protection of IP

Second, the widespread adoption of technical solutions depends on realizing the delicate balance between enabling free public access and protecting key components of the technology. Free public access alleviates the financial burden of adopting platform-based technical solutions, which accelerates the desired universal implementation and expands the solution’s reach. As the platform accumulates users and contributors, it incrementally compounds utility and becomes an essential industry requirement rather than a simple convenience. Ubiquity, therefore, is not only the intended outcome; it is a necessary step in the solution’s implementation.

On the other hand, solutions that require adoption by the private sector must enable commercialization and protect trade secrets if they are to bring value to the very corporate institutions needed to make them useful. This limits the extent to which the free public access that makes the solution indispensable can be granted. This quandary summarizes the quintessential balancing act that intellectual property law has grappled with since its inception in modern society: how can one design a system that protects enough of an ingenious solution to incentivize innovation through the promise of exclusive commercialization while exposing enough to encourage social progress, adoption, use, and future innovation.

Multi-disciplinary Immersion: A Powerful Tool

While I did not personally solve those issues, I look forward to exploring the solutions that the CodeX team will devise. Instead, my immersion into an extremely talented and capable multidisciplinary team at the world’s most advanced legal and technical institution taught me something else I found foundational. Multidisciplinary teams can be extremely effective in bridging the silos of knowledge and skill created by the specialized educational model of today’s post-secondary institutions. CodeX is a perfect example of the interdisciplinary collaboration that is a necessary prerequisite for the accelerated materialization of the robotic age.

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IP Intensive: An Engineer in Silicon Valley Plus a Law Student at Stanford University Equals a Kid in a Candy Store - A Semester at CodeX /osgoode/iposgoode/2018/12/06/ip-intensive-an-engineer-in-silicon-valley-plus-a-law-student-at-stanford-university-equals-a-kid-in-a-candy-store-a-semester-at-codex/ Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:08:50 +0000 https://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=2968 My experience at CodeX at Stanford University was like being a kid in a candy store. After immersing myself in the engineering field for some years and then jumping into the legal field, I desired an opportunity to take a step back and study how law and engineering can intersect. CodeX was such an opportunity. […]

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My experience at at Stanford University was like being a kid in a candy store. After immersing myself in the engineering field for some years and then jumping into the legal field, I desired an opportunity to take a step back and study how law and engineering can intersect. CodeX was such an opportunity. CodeX, the Stanford Centre for Legal Informatics at Stanford University, is where like minded individuals from law, engineering, and computer science work together to advance legal technology.  Some individuals work on shaping policy to accommodate the advancement in technology (e.g., policy for AI and big data) while others work on innovating the legal industry to facilitate legal work (e.g., searching for precedents).

At Codex, you can choose from a smorgasbord of different flavours of legal tech innovations, such as predicting what the judge or jury would decide a case through predictive analysis,  due diligence tools for extracting relevant paragraphs from contracts, chatbots for laypersons to get answers to questions such as, "Can I BBQ on this beach?", search utility tools, where instead of using keywords or Boolean searches, users may copy and paste an entire paragraph and the algorithm will find precedents and related cases. I am pleased that I had the opportunity to meet with and learn from individuals working on these projects.

Flexibility and encouragement were key in making my placement at CodeX unparalleled experience. In my first few days at CodeX and after meeting with Dr. Roland Vogl, CodeX's executive director and my placement supervisor, I was assigned a project that revolved around scraping, data collection and analysis - it was an interesting project to say the least.  But while doing my research on my assigned project through CodeX’s many publicly available , another project crystallized that was more related to Canada and my interests.  Luckily, it still involved scraping, and data collection and analysis, and Dr. Vogl was very supportive of the new project and offered CodeX's resources to carry out my project.

The number of available resources made available to me was mind-blowing. CodeX's mandate is to connect law and technology, it therefore had an extensive network with computer scientists and engineers at Stanford University and other institutions. Whether it was accessing a programming book from the library or finding answers to a technical or law related question, the invaluable connections I made during my placement at CodeX made it possible for me to achieve success.

There was a wide spectrum of events and courses taught by renowned professionals for me to attend, more than time would allow and for my brain to digest.  The array of activities available to me was like being a kid in a candy store, and I gorged myself attending to as many events and classes as I could during my first few weeks at Stanford.  To offer you a taste of some of the events I attended, here are some events that stood out for me: a series called "Artificial Intelligence in Real Life" presented by directors from Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and NASA, organized by the Stanford's school of engineering, and a talk entitled, "Chief Justice Robot" by Prof. Eugene Volokh of UCLA, and a talk entitled, "One Giant Leap for Machinekind: Generative Adversarial Networks and the Next Age of Tech Regulation" by Prof. Jeff Ward of Duke University.  I have worked on AI in industry and during my graduate studies, nevertheless, my experiences at Stanford have rewired my brain and given me more appreciation on how AI is currently being used in society.

If I were to be given the opportunity again, I would take it in a heartbeat. My goal now is to bring back what I learned to Canada. I give my sincere thanks to IP Osgoode for believing in me and for giving me this great opportunity at CodeX.

 

Written by Wael Louis.  Wael is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and was enrolled in Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program. As part of the program requirements, students were asked to write a reflective blog on their internship experience.

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IP Intensive: CodeX - My Silicon Valley Dream /osgoode/iposgoode/2018/01/16/ip-intensive-codex-my-silicon-valley-dream/ Tue, 16 Jan 2018 21:54:40 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=31254 When I left for Stanford, I really did not know what to expect. All I knew was that I would be a visiting student researcher at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics; I knew that I had to write a paper; and I knew that I wanted to create an app to help university […]

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When I left for Stanford, I really did not know what to expect. All I knew was that I would be a visiting student researcher at ; I knew that I had to write a paper; and I knew that I wanted to create an app to help university students navigate IP law. However, beyond this understanding of my role, I was “flying blind”. In fact, my “vision” was not even improved after meeting with my supervisor, Dr. Roland Vogl, who said that I should not expect to be given any direction while at CodeX.

At the time, this was all very daunting. However, I would now tell anyone that if given the opportunity to go to a place like Stanford to explore, learn, meet leading experts, befriend computer scientists, and, for the lack of a better term, “live the Silicon Valley dream” all without an agenda, this is something you cannot pass up. The reason being is that the opportunity to be dropped into the center of an emerging field, surrounded by experts, and to not have to be an expert yourself is a once in a life time experience.

At this point it may be appropriate to explain what I did while at CodeX, but rather, I will describe the last day of my placement: the highlight of my trip. To put in context how highly I regard this last day, it should be noted that it was in direct competition with tours of Apple and Facebook, trips to San Francisco and Yosemite, cooking with a Michelin Star Chef, and watching baseball, hockey, and football games for the title of being the highlight of my placement.

So why was Friday, November 17 so special? The day started with presentations from CodeX Fellows and other legal tech researchers in front of a team of venture capitalists (“VCs”). The purpose of this meeting was to give the VCs a sense of the future legal tech market. These presentations discussed the creation of smart contracts, the automation of legal citation, and artificial intelligence policy proposals.

After these presentations, we transitioned into a planning meeting for the . During this portion of the day, I had the opportunity to listen to the leaders of legal tech suggest panel discussion topics based off of the questions they had pertaining to the future of legal tech. In other words, I learned what the experts themselves didn’t know.

Following the planning session, we reconvened with the VCs and heard pitches from current legal tech startups. For example, these startups were working on negotiation tools, blockchain decentralization, and smart contract prosecution. After each presentation, the VCs peppered the presenters with questions about their technology and value proposition.

At this point, you might be starting to see why this was an extraordinary day, but there is more. What made this day exceptional was that it perfectly summarized my entire experience at CodeX.

When listening to the experts of legal tech give recommendations for discussion points at FutureLaw, I was brought back to when I decided what I wanted to write my paper on and how I had to pitch it to the class. When sitting in on the discussions of legal tech research I was reminded of all the research I had performed in the areas of tech transfer and the patentability of inventions created by artificial intelligence. I was also reminded of the discussions I had with my classmates and Stanford Professors regarding these topics as well. Lastly, during the pitch sessions, I saw what I was working towards and gained insights into how to sell a product. Furthermore, and possibly most importantly, I witnessed the passion and dedication required to become a successful entrepreneur. The way each presenter talked about their business made it obvious that they absolutely loved and breathed their technology. Furthermore, the way they handled questions was inspiring and an amazing example of what advocacy should look like.

I hope this brief discussion of my time at CodeX has exemplified the amazing time I had there. I was very fortunate to be given this opportunity and I therefore want to conclude by thanking for making this opportunity a dream come true. I have no doubt that my role as a legal tech entrepreneur has only begun to bud, and I am therefore ecstatic to see where these connections, knowledge, and newly formed passions will take me next.

 

Denver Bandstra is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and was enrolled in Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program. As part of the program requirements, students were asked to write a reflective blog on their internship experience.

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IP Intensive: Stanford CodeX – Sunshine, Start-ups and Silicon Valley /osgoode/iposgoode/2017/01/19/ip-intensive-stanford-codex-sunshine-start-ups-and-silicon-valley/ Thu, 19 Jan 2017 16:58:37 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=30258 Silicon Valley is the nexus of the entrepreneurship in the 21st century. While European tourists may duck into a medieval church to sightsee, a Bay Area tourist may take in any number of technological cathedrals. In the Bay, it is easy to trace the history of technology companies like Google, Tesla, Hewlett Packard and Apple […]

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Silicon Valley is the nexus of the entrepreneurship in the 21st century. While European tourists may duck into a medieval church to sightsee, a Bay Area tourist may take in any number of technological cathedrals. In the Bay, it is easy to trace the history of technology companies like Google, Tesla, Hewlett Packard and Apple from humble beginnings in garages and university labs to flashy corporate campuses. A significant number of these companies have their roots at Stanford University, and it is a focal point for innovation in the Bay Area. It was my distinct honour to have my placement with Osgoode’s at .

This past semester at CodeX has offered me an array of experiences: first as a law student, but also as an engineer, a tourist, and a legal technologist. Codex is the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, bringing together law students, lawyers, entrepreneurs, technologists and software developers to explore and advance applications of technology to legal systems. As a law student with a background in software development, CodeX offered me a unique opportunity to combine my past experience with my education at Osgoode.

The main focus of my placement at CodeX was to assist in the design and development of the . The Index is an open source database that tracks a broad spectrum of innovative legal tech companies. These companies represent an incoming wave of disruption to the legal industry, although the degree of disruption is not yet clear.

In the Bay Area, disruption is a consistent theme that goes hand-in-hand with entrepreneurship. In 2011, Silicon Valley trailblazer Marc Andreessen declared that “”, arguing that we are in the middle of a dramatic shift where software companies are poised to disrupt and dominate established markets. In the 6 years since, we have seen his predictions to come true many times over.

Uber’s disruption of the , Airbnb’s disruption of the , Netflix’s disruption of the television and and Amazon’s disruption of both online and brick-and-mortar all evidence the truth in Andreessen’s argument. There is also an emerging consensus about the reasons why this disruption is so prevalent now: minimal barriers to entry for software start-ups, wide public adoption of broadband Internet and mobile phones, the numbers of software developers and data scientists graduated each year, the inherently data-focussed approach used in software, and finally the maturity of software development processes to quickly and robustly build quality applications.

Legal tech has faced its share of headwinds, but also huge potential. In the words of my Stanford advisor Dr. Roland Vogl “The reality has not matched the rhetoric”. While there are some players who are broadly successful (legal service providers such as LegalZoom, Avvo and RocketLawyer are examples of this), the adoption of legal tech has its own share of unique challenges and has struggled to find the critical mass required to trigger its broad adoption. The potential of legal technology is more efficient practice, higher quality service delivery for clients, and improved access to justice with new delivery methods and lower costs.

Many of the successful established legal tech companies so far operate as so-called document and process automation, assisting their customers with streamlining practice management and document drafting. Newer legal tech start-ups however are applying data analytics and machine learning technologies to areas of the law. These new applications offer the ability to assist lawyers in assessing risk and decision making, and in some cases making decisions themselves.

Two start-ups who visited CodeX during my placement were and Each offers predictive analytics for lawmakers and lawyers. The former offers real-time prediction of the success of proposed legislation, and the latter predicts of outcomes of court and tribunal cases. The predictive capacity of these services offers major value for lawyers in representing the interests of their clients. These services are also among the first, and there will be many more technologies to come offering predictive capabilities in other fields.

This semester has given me the opportunity to see what law could be, and how it may change. The future may hold incremental changes in practice or even broad paradigm shifts in the practice itself. It’s reassuring to know that there are institutions like CodeX considering the benefits and the consequences of innovative changes in the legal profession.

 

Paul Blizzard is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and was enrolled in Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program. As part of the program requirements, students were asked to write a reflective blog on their internship experience.

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IP Intensive: Stranger in a Strange Land - Or, How a Semester at CodeX made me Comfortable With “Think [Like a Lawyer, but] Different” /osgoode/iposgoode/2016/01/12/ip-intensive-stranger-in-a-strange-land-or-how-a-semester-at-codex-made-me-comfortable-with-think-like-a-lawyer-but-different/ Tue, 12 Jan 2016 23:12:57 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=28613 Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man. - Robert […]

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Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

- Robert Heinlein, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, 1961

Let’s start with a fact pattern. Say that you have a background in building software, and believe in innovation. Now, imagine that you see a massive problem with the and the millions of people who have been dis-empowered by it. What would you do?

If your answer is “go to law school,” know that I made the same mistake.

Just like on exams, the obvious choice is often a trap. After two years of studying the law, I was disaffected and ready to quit to do something that added more value to society, like becoming a barista. It was pretty obvious to me what happens when you combine a particular with an existing complex system and of that reasoning methodology. The that would lead to disempowerment was kind of obvious, and I was finding it very difficult to justify spending ridiculous amounts of money to be a part of it.

But then I had the chance to spend a semester at , The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and now I have hope.

Law is an information technology. Facts and rules (information) are processed to generate decisions and opinions. Legal Informatics is the study of the structure and processing of information applied to legal problems. Just as the has in the creation of culture, applying digital technology to the processing of legal information has the potential to empower the disempowered, and revive the concept of a just society.

The best place to start when you are passionate about innovation and information technology is Silicon Valley.

The digital revolution has , and there are legitimate criticisms of the that lies under Silicon Valley. But one of the key insights of Information Technology is the ability to , to , and to . The very culture of the valley is intensely optimistic, and the focus is not on wealth generation, but on value generation. As Alan Kay put it: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

At CodeX I have met dozens of entrepreneurs who are passionate about fixing the bugs in the legal system. They are building tools to lower costs, reduce complexity, and help give the doctrine of the “irributtable presumption of knowledge” of the law some legitimacy. I have met recovering lawyers, aspiring engineers, and dedicated designers that are comfortable with borrowing ideas from outside the law and applying them to thinking about the law. I have found every person I’ve met here an inspiration.

To fix the problem, you must grok the problem.

I came to CodeX with a naïve assumption that I could fix a legal problem simply and quickly, and wanted to jump right in. As a programmer, I used to call this “coding before thinking”, “”, and “a band-aid solution”. But as I began to research, I quickly realized that I was approaching the problem from the wrong perspective, and rather than build another , I fell back on my programmer’s intuition by applying methods of debugging and .

My semester at CodeX allowed me to explore the academic literature, learning both of the causes of the legal empowerment problems and the criticisms of legal informatics. I learned about how credence goods and complexity contribute to , and create market failures through pricing theory. I was able to identify particular niches created by systemic failures that created real opportunities to empower people through simple applications of existing technology. I am currently working on a paper that outlines this research, and contemplating ways of building such solutions.

In the valley I also had the chance to stretch mental muscles that had been atrophying. I wrote code for a piece of software to manage information about new legal tech start-ups, read academic papers on machine learning, and attended lectures on cyber-security, privacy, and applications for corpus linguistics techniques. I learned a new (programming) language, and started contributing again to Open Source software. Embedded in the culture of entrepreneurship and value creation allowed me to feel more like myself than I have in a long time.

The semester that I spent at CodeX was by far the high point of my law-school career -- and not only because of the of the Bay Area. I was left with a renewed sense of purpose and hope, both for my future in law and for the future of the law in general.

: I am far more comfortable being a stranger in the strange land, now that I know I’m not alone.

 

Mark Harris Evans is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and was enrolled in Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law Intensive Program. As part of the program requirements, students were asked to write a reflective blog on their internship experience.

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IP Intensive: Experiencing the Heart of the Legal Technology Boom at CodeX /osgoode/iposgoode/2015/01/13/ip-intensive-experiencing-the-heart-of-the-legal-technology-boom-at-codex/ Tue, 13 Jan 2015 05:02:59 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=26320 This fall semester I had the honour of attending CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics as part of Osgoode's Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program.  CodeX’s broad mission is to design technologies for a better legal system. Taking this mission in earnest I set out to develop Econo.Mine, a legal analytics platform meant to […]

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This fall semester I had the honour of attending  as part of Osgoode's .  CodeX’s broad mission is to design technologies for a better legal system. Taking this mission in earnest I set out to develop Econo.Mine, a legal analytics platform meant to decipher a judge’s understanding of econometrics used in antitrust litigation. My desire to create Econo.Mine was in response to the rise of complex economic analyses used in antitrust arguments since the late 1990s. By tracking the rate of keywords used in antitrust cases and comparing the frequency of those keywords with appeal rates, Econo.Mine would be able to analyze cases according to their economic complexity and determine which concepts and statistical analyses were particularly difficult for judges. The overall objective of Econo.Mine is to improve the drafting of expert testimonies and judicial education in economics so that judges can make better use of the arguments presented to them when deciding cases.

 

Developing Econo.Mine at CodeX put me in a position that would make any legal technologist envious. Unlike many of my CodeX colleagues, I was devoid of any coding skills before coming to CodeX. However, the entrepreneurial spirit and positive energy at CodeX provided me with the flexibility and support I needed to make a serious dent in my project. Speaking with people like Itai from and Pablo from allowed me to strategize how I could automate the extraction of data from cases and filter keywords from those cases using regular expressions. I even went beyond the CodeX stratosphere by collaborating with a PhD student at to develop a code that could count the frequencies of my keywords in a document and paste those statistics to a spreadsheet. These successes may have seemed like pebbles to those who helped. To me, however, they were nothing short of milestones.

 

Even more rewarding was the ability to witness the burgeoning legal-tech startup community at CodeX. I regularly attended CodeX’s weekly meetings where a legal tech entrepreneur would present their technology and entertain questions from the CodeX attendees. Some of the presentations discussed fundamentally changing technology projects. These projects included , a company that wants to digitize corporations into block-chain systems and use Bitcoin as its default online payment system.

 

Other presentations focused on technology that was familiar but resoundingly helpful. This included a website that improves transactions for child support payments (see ) and a plugin that shows campaign contributions of politicians who are mentioned in online news articles (see ). The growth of this legal tech startup industry was even more pronounced at the CodeX Demo Event and at the CodeX/ Thomson Reuters Summit, where several companies showcased their new technology. The positive reception to these innovative projects and the excitement surrounding their potential growth revealed that these companies were already making a dent in the way that individuals within and outside the legal community interact with the law.

 

What was almost more revealing from these presentations was that CodeX was the beating heart behind this legal tech community. This was clear in the way that presenters and attendees described CodeX and its bold initiatives underway, such as the Computable Contracts Initiative and the Open Data Initiative. It was also reflected in the trust that our partners bestowed upon us and their consistent eagerness to help us meet our goals. The fact that companies like , , , and  have thrived from their relationship with CodeX is evidence of CodeX’s fundamental importance to the community.

 

There is an energy at CodeX that makes leaving very difficult. You sense that it is accomplishing something that no other legal technology organization in the world has accomplished and you know that it’s going to be big. For that reason I’ve decided to only leave CodeX in a physical sense. While I look forward to resuming my regular course schedule at Osgoode, I will continue to work with CodeX on my technology as well as co-manage their website. I am also working with a CodeX affiliate to help map the legal technology industry around the world. It is a hefty project but one that it is absolutely achievable thanks to the breadth of CodeX’s intellectual dedication, hard-working mentality, and inspiring entrepreneurial spirit.

 

Peter Neufeld is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Features Editor for the IPilogue.  Peter was enrolled in Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program. As part of the program requirements, students were asked to write a reflective blog on their internship experience.

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IP Intensive Program: Interning at CodeX, at Stanford University: The Highlight of My Law School Experience /osgoode/iposgoode/2014/01/09/ip-intensive-program-interning-at-codex-at-stanford-university-the-highlight-of-my-law-school-experience/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 18:33:19 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=23782 Last semester, I had the honour of interning at the CodeX Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. This internship was one of the many placements available through Osgoode Hall Law School's Intellectual Property Law & Technology Intensive Program. This program provides students with a two week period of discussions with […]

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Last semester, I had the honour of interning at the CodeX Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. This internship was one of the many placements available through Osgoode Hall Law School's Intellectual Property Law & Technology Intensive Program. This program provides students with a two week period of discussions with industry and legal specialists, followed by a ten week internship period at various local, national, and international organizations.

is a research group partnership between Stanford Law School and Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. Run by Directors Michael Genesereth and Roland Vogl, the research group focuses on the intersection of software technology and law, and promotes legal technology to empower all parties within the legal system. The research performed within the group is sometimes spun out into Silicon Valley start-ups. CodeX’s current focus is on . Computational law is as “the study of formal representations and automated reasoning with laws (governmental regulations, business rules, and contracts) in electronically-mediated domains.”

The CodeX placement is a unique IP Intensive placement because the Center’s research goes far beyond intellectual property law. This provides a challenge and an opportunity to the IP Intensive Intern to find or create a computational law project within the subject of intellectual property. Students from the two worked for a and conducted research within the legal technology and informatics area. With the approval of the CodeX Directors, I created a project to apply computational law concepts to the patent system.

My project consisted of interpreting the patent prosecution system of both the U.S. and Canada into separate finite state machines (FSMs). The FSMs were then used to generate code that captured the various states and transitions found within the FSM. A software library was then created to capture this logic, in the hopes of a legal technology platform for patent system software tools. The project was a very educational process for me, and like most software systems, habitually behind schedule. Through the process I realized the potential that exists within the legal technology field and the challenges that this technology must overcome. The possibilities are great: a properly designed legal technology product can greatly improve access to justice and, if it is disruptive enough, could usher in a drastic change to the legal industry. Intellectual property systems are prime candidates for computational law tools: they operate around , information about the system is , and they do not face some of the jurisdictional challenges that other legal systems face due to well-defined .

The overall experience of my internship was, in a word, incredible. Stanford, California does not know how to discourage any idea, thought, or dream. Everyone you share your thoughts with is legitimately interested in what you would like to achieve, and will do anything they can to help. You get a very good sense of why this area became known as Silicon Valley, and why start-ups try to move down here. Impossible does not exist.

I come home to Toronto happy though, knowing that our local information technology industry is in good hands. While we may not share the high levels of optimism for every idea, the technical ability and management skills found in the Greater Toronto Area are equal to what is seen in Silicon Valley. The key difference between the two markets is the experience of the entrepreneur, which will come to Toronto in time.

The IP Intensive program is a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight into the real legal issues that exist outside the walls of a law school. I would have never been able to meet so many interesting people working on legal problems that are not traditionally discussed in law school. This experience has been the highlight of my three years at Osgoode Hall Law School. I would like to thank Professor Vaver, Professor D’Agostino, and Michelle Li from IP Osgoode for running such a fantastic program, and Roland Vogl and Robert Lee from CodeX for partnering with IP Osgoode and being very supportive during my term.

Mark Bowman is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and was enrolled in Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law Intensive Program. As part of the program requirements, students were asked to write a reflective blog on their internship experience.

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Announcing the 2013 IP Intensive Program /osgoode/iposgoode/2013/08/29/announcing-the-2013-ip-intensive-program/ Thu, 29 Aug 2013 04:27:33 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=22240 We are pleased to announce details of the 2013 Intellectual Property Law and Technology Intensive Program.  The tremendously successful program is currently in its third year, but it is continuing to grow. We are excited to announce the offering of three brand new placements for 2013, and the return of an excellent placement from the […]

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We are pleased to announce details of the 2013 .  The tremendously successful program is currently in its third year, but it is continuing to grow. We are excited to announce the offering of three brand new placements for 2013, and the return of an excellent placement from the program's inaugural year.

We have a wonderful array of , from government agencies to media organizations, hi-tech companies, and innovation centres. For the Fall 2013 term, we have partnered with three brand new placement organizations: Apotex, Cobalt Pharmaceuticals Company (the Canadian subsidy of Actavis, Inc.) and CBC/Radio-Canada. We are also pleased to welcome the return of TVO from our inaugural year. Other IP intensive placement organizations include: Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, Industry Canada (Copyright and International IP Policy Branch), the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), Stanford Centre for Legal Informatics (CodeX), The Globe and Mail, and VentureLAB.

The IP Intensive is a unique program that gives students practical, experiential education in a workplace setting for an entire term in lieu of being in the classroom. Our students gain valuable practical experience which will assist them in obtaining employment after law school, and some of our students' research in the program has been published in the (IPJ).

The IP Intensive begins with , led by IP Intensive Students currently enrolled in the IP Intensive, which will feature presentations and workshops by experts prominent in the IP community. The seminars will cover a wide variety of topics, from “Trade-mark Prosecution” to “Intellectual Property Reform Process”, from “Biotechnology Focus: Pharma” to “Digital Media, Journalism, Freedom of Expression”.  Our IP Intensive students will be interacting and engaging in stimulating discussions with the Chair of the Trade-marks Opposition Board, a senior policy analyst from Canadian Heritage (Copyright Policy Branch), counsel from the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s Office, in-house counsel and top executives from a broad range of industries, practitioners from the major Canadian law firms, academics and members of the judiciary. Then IP Intensive Student Interns will participate in an 11-week internship with one of our placement partners.

The program director for 2013 will be Professor David Vaver. Throughout the term, the students will be meeting with him periodically to discuss topics relating to intellectual property law, to share their experiences in the work environment, and to participate in a cross-pollination of ideas. The students will also be maintaining a reflective journal and blog on the . They are also responsible to lead their own seminar presentations, which will occupy the wrap-up week of the course.

If you are interested in attending any of our sessions or participating as a placement, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me directly.

 

Giuseppina D’Agostino is the Founder and Director of IP Osgoode, an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, and the Founder of the IP Intensive.

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The CodeX Experience: Life as a Visiting Researcher at Stanford /osgoode/iposgoode/2012/10/02/the-codex-experience-life-as-a-visiting-researcher-at-stanford/ Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:43:57 +0000 http://www.iposgoode.ca/?p=18437 With the start of the new season, the IP Intensive program is in full swing. Osgoode students Nancy Situ and Maximilian Paterson are currently at Stanford Law School as Visiting Researchers assigned to CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Both students currently maintain a blog chronicling their insights as Visiting Researchers in the heart of […]

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With the start of the new season, the IP Intensive program is in full swing. Osgoode students Nancy Situ and Maximilian Paterson are currently at as Visiting Researchers assigned to .

Both students currently maintain a blog chronicling their insights as Visiting Researchers in the heart of Silicon Valley. To follow their experiences, see the links below:

Nancy Situ:

Maximilian Paterson:

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