Students Win AI Software Contest

This article originally appeared in the Fall-Winter 2018 issue of Carolina Law.

A Carolina Law student team won a contest at Duke Law in October using an artificial intelligence software platform to analyze legal contracts. Rana Odeh 3L, Mariam Turner 3L and Dean Yu 3L made up one of the twelve teams competing from Carolina Law, Duke Law and Wake Forest School of Law at the Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship Bullpen. Students were trained in the A.I. software, then given a legal research problem to solve.

“It’s like a Westlaw search on steroids,” says Jeffrey Hirsch, Geneva Yeargan Rand Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC. “Students train the software to search a database of contracts for various clauses that were relevant to issues presented in a hypothetical fact pattern. Because they had training for only a few hours the day before, the students used the A.I. software’s more basic capabilities, but the relevant information they were able to pull was far better than more typical software searches.”

The other two UNC teams were 2Ls Anza Abbas, Jennifer Lee and Jacklyn Torrez; and Marion Brown, Nicholas Hall and Yve Wu. The contest was sponsored by the Duke Center on Law & Technology, the Duke Law & Technology Society, and Seal Software, which provided the A.I. software, training and contest problem.

Check out photos on Twitter with #LegalAIShowdown.

-December 26, 2018