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News & Updates

March 2025

Participant Spotlight

Meet Shellie Reid

Initiatives from the Network

Resources and updates from Working Groups and the RAILS Team

AI News and Research

Curated information about AI in legal services

Participant Spotlight 🔦

Shellie Reid is the Manager of the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project (LSNTAP), overseeing the delivery of technology-focused education and training to legal aid providers nationwide.

Her approach emphasizes enhancing digital skills across all personnel, recognizing technology's pervasive impact on legal work, and the importance of elevating technological proficiency throughout the workforce to better serve clients.

A key aspect of her role involves familiarizing organizations with transformative technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), that are poised to reshape the legal services landscape. 

Read more.

Initiatives from the RAILS Network 🌱

New resource available! 

The RAILS AI Risk Management Framework (RMF): Guidance for Corporate Legal Teams offers legal professionals a practical, comprehensive approach to managing AI-related risks in their organizations.

This resource is designed as a step-by-step “how-to” guide, not just a compliance checklist. It empowers legal teams to build, implement, and maintain an AI Risk Management Framework (RMF) tailored to their unique operational, legal, and technological contexts.

Like all RAILS resources, the RAILS Risk Management Framework Guidance is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International: CC BY-NC 4.0 

Use Cases for GenAI in Legal

Review the first ten RAILS one-pagers about use cases for GenAI in legal, just published in February 2025 with more to come as they are completed. 

LinkedIn Group for RAILS Participants

Connect with other participants in RAILS on LinkedIn in our new group.

Attending a Conference?

If you're presenting at a conference and want to share about RAILS resources, you may use these slides (PDF or PowerPoint).

Email us at rails@law.duke.edu to let us know where and when you'll be sharing about RAILS resources.  

We can mail you handouts and even small buttons to give out to other attendees - submit this form no less than 1 week in advance. 

AI News and Research 🎙️

• Read the guidelines for responsible use of AI by judicial officers: Navigating AI in the Judiciary: New Guidelines for Judges and Their Chambers, created by the Working Group on AI and the Courts as part of the ABA’s Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence.

• Researchers found that performance evaluation of LLMs is nuanced and context-dependent, resisting simple, one-size-fits-all approaches. Ethan Mollick notes on LinkedIn that "How you measure against benchmarks matters a lot, and you need to pick benchmarks that match your use case."  Read more from Lennart Meincke, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, and Dan Shapiro, all of the University of Pennsylvania.

• The Vals Legal AI Report (VLAIR) is the first-of-its-kind study to evaluate how four legal AI tools perform across seven legal tasks, benchmarking their results against those produced by a lawyer control group (the Lawyer Baseline). The seven tasks evaluated in this study were Data Extraction, Document Q&A, Document Summarization, Redlining, Transcript Analysis, Chronology Generation, and EDGAR Research, representing a range of functions commonly performed by legal professionals. The evaluated tools were CoCounsel (from Thomson Reuters), Vincent AI (from vLex), Harvey Assistant (from Harvey), and Oliver (from Vecflow). 

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