New law happens…

https://www.databreaches.net/sec-sues-covington-law-firm-for-names-of-300-clients-caught-up-in-hack/

SEC sues Covington law firm for names of 300 clients caught up in hack

Andrew Goudsward reports:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has sued law firm Covington & Burling for details about nearly 300 of the firm’s clientsd whose information was accessed or stolen by hackers in a previously undisclosed cyberattack, court documents show.

Hackers associated with the Hafnium cyber-espionage group, which has alleged ties to the Chinese government, gained access to Covington’s computer networks around November 2020, accessing private information about the firm’s clients, including 298 publicly traded companies, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the SEC.

Read more at Reuters.

For its part, Covington says it was a state-sponsored attack that affected a limited number of clients and that the firm had notified those clients and worked with the FBI.

But does attorney-client privilege trump the SEC’s authority to investigate? This is an interesting one to watch.

Are we closer to replacing lawyers with AI? (If not, why not?)

https://www.bespacific.com/the-implications-of-openais-assistant-for-legal-services-and-society/

The Implications of OpenAI’s Assistant for Legal Services and Society

ChatGPT, Open AI’s Assistant and Perlman, Andrew, The Implications of OpenAI’s Assistant for Legal Services and Society (December 5, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4294197 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4294197

“On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT. To demonstrate the chatbot’s remarkable sophistication and its potential implications, both for legal services and society more generally, a human author generated this paper in about an hour through prompts within ChatGPT. Only this abstract, the outline headers, and the prompts were written by a person. ChatGPT generated the rest of the text with no human editing. To be clear, the responses generated by ChatGPT were imperfect and at times problematic, and the use of an AI tool for law-related services raises a host of regulatory and ethical issues. At the same time, ChatGPT highlights the promise of artificial intelligence, including its ability to affect our lives in both modest and more profound ways. ChatGPT suggests an imminent reimagination of how we access and create information, obtain legal and other services, and prepare people for their careers. We also will soon face new questions about the role of knowledge workers in society, the attribution of work (e.g., determining when people’s written work is their own), and the potential misuse of and excessive reliance on the information produced by these kinds of tools. The disruptions from AI’s rapid development are no longer in the distant future. They have arrived, and this document offers a small taste of what lies ahead.”