Dr. Megan Ma
Menlo Park, California, United States
3K followers
500+ connections
About
Passionate and ambitious with a high interest in computable law and generative AI and…
Activity
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24 hour countdown starts now! Generative AI is revolutionising how lawyers work. Join us to discuss: - How law firms should start to think about…
24 hour countdown starts now! Generative AI is revolutionising how lawyers work. Join us to discuss: - How law firms should start to think about…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Can prompt engineering with plain GPT-4o reach Harvey's BigLawBench? 🤔 Recently, Harvey published part of his #BigLawBench on GitHub…
Can prompt engineering with plain GPT-4o reach Harvey's BigLawBench? 🤔 Recently, Harvey published part of his #BigLawBench on GitHub…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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I recently discovered that there is a £1.65 trillion gender savings gap. This exists for a multitude of factors including lower earnings (and…
I recently discovered that there is a £1.65 trillion gender savings gap. This exists for a multitude of factors including lower earnings (and…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
Experience
Education
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Sciences Po
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To read my doctoral thesis: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03618704/
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- Present
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Exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence, law, and linguistics
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Activities and Societies: Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition
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Activities and Societies: Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation
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Activities and Societies: AIESEC McGill, McGill Model United Nations, International Criminal Court Student Network, DECA, YOUths-Jeunes Leadership Program, Corporate Case Simulation
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Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Advisory Board
University of Valencia Legal Tech Lab
- Present 3 years 9 months
Provide regular insights and advice on ongoing projects, act as liaison for potential collaborations
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Research and Consulting Intern
Diversity Lab
- 1 year 8 months
Provide research, writing, and consulting support to Diversity Lab's ongoing projects and initiatives including WomenLegalExperts.com and Women in Leadership Hackathon.
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Director of Alumni Relations
AIESEC McGill
- 5 months
Facilitate mentorship program by activating leadership of AIESEC Alumni to current members
Develop an environment for networking with experienced alumni, connecting current members and providing the necessary support in the corporate world
Hosted largest Alumni Night, celebrating and forming ties between past to current and new members
Publications
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Terms-we-Serve-with: Five dimensions for anticipating and repairing algorithmic harm
Big Data & Society
Power and information asymmetries between people and digital technology companies are further legitimized through contractual agreements that fail to provide meaningful consent and contestability. In particular, the Terms-of-Service (ToS) agreement, is a contract of adhesion where companies effectively set the terms and conditions of the contract. Whereas, ToS reinforce existing structural inequalities, we seek to enable an intersectional accountability mechanism grounded in the practice of…
Power and information asymmetries between people and digital technology companies are further legitimized through contractual agreements that fail to provide meaningful consent and contestability. In particular, the Terms-of-Service (ToS) agreement, is a contract of adhesion where companies effectively set the terms and conditions of the contract. Whereas, ToS reinforce existing structural inequalities, we seek to enable an intersectional accountability mechanism grounded in the practice of algorithmic reparation. Building on existing critiques of ToS in the context of algorithmic systems, we return to the roots of contract theory by recentering notions of agency and mutual assent. We evolve a multipronged intervention we frame as the Terms-we-Serve-with (TwSw) social, computational, and legal framework. The TwSw is a new social imaginary centered on: (1) co-constitution of user agreements, through participatory mechanisms; (2) addressing friction, leveraging the fields of design justice and critical design in the production and resolution of conflict; (3) enabling refusal mechanisms, reflecting the need for a sufficient level of human oversight and agency including opting out; (4) complaint and algorithmic harms reporting, through a feminist studies lens and open-sourced computational tools; and (5) disclosure-centered mediation, to disclose, acknowledge, and take responsibility for harm, drawing on the field of medical law. We further inform our analysis through an exploratory design workshop with a South African gender-based violence reporting AI startup. We derive practical strategies for communities, technologists, and policy-makers to leverage a relational approach to algorithmic reparation and propose there's a need for a radical restructuring of the “take-it-or-leave-it” ToS agreement.
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Conceptual Questions in Developing Expert-Annotated Data
ICAIL '23: Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
In this paper, we argue that nuanced expert annotation often requires a significant rethinking of the traditional paradigms of data annotation. In a small pilot study, we find that even the most highly trained experts demonstrate significant heterogeneity in their evaluation of the document-level coherence of bespoke contracts. The outcomes of our study provide preliminary considerations of how paradigms of document annotation should fully utilize expert annotations in bespoke contexts.
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Elasticity for Computable (Re)insurance
Sage Journals
Elasticity offers contractual parties the linguistic space to manage the unknown. While this has historically operated as a powerful tool in negotiation, elasticity has also behaved as a double-edged sword. That is, elastic language facilitates the present, but does not account for the future. In this article, we consider that by understanding the role of vagueness in contracts, and in effect, making the implicit explicit, it may be more rewarding strategically for contractual parties in the…
Elasticity offers contractual parties the linguistic space to manage the unknown. While this has historically operated as a powerful tool in negotiation, elasticity has also behaved as a double-edged sword. That is, elastic language facilitates the present, but does not account for the future. In this article, we consider that by understanding the role of vagueness in contracts, and in effect, making the implicit explicit, it may be more rewarding strategically for contractual parties in the long term. Specific to the context of reinsurance, we notice that elasticity may be regarded as a mirror to negotiation dynamics, traceable by the linguistic complexity of contractual clauses. Therefore, a determination of elasticity, through a diagnostic tool, can offer insights to enable for more intentional drafting and certainty at the contract performance stage.
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The Mathematization of Legal Writing
Oxford University Press
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The Legislative Recipe: Syntax for Machine-Readable Legislation
Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property
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Deconstructing Legal Text: Object-Oriented Design in Legal Adjudication
MIT Computational Law Report
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Transplanting Sunstein in a New Era: From Political to Technological Conflict
13 J.P.P.L 467-478
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The Law's New Language?
Harvard International Law Journal
The relationship between law and language has always been one born of necessity. Language is often conceived as the vehicle in which legal norms could embed itself. In confrontation with legal automation, technologies that harness algorithms to perform banal tasks translate “legalese” from common standards into code. Effectively, machines are interpreting the language of legal processes into its own understandable terms. This begs the question: how does the “code-ification” of legal language…
The relationship between law and language has always been one born of necessity. Language is often conceived as the vehicle in which legal norms could embed itself. In confrontation with legal automation, technologies that harness algorithms to perform banal tasks translate “legalese” from common standards into code. Effectively, machines are interpreting the language of legal processes into its own understandable terms. This begs the question: how does the “code-ification” of legal language differ from existing legal practice? More importantly, does this change the inherent character of the law? This article discusses broadly the technological environment in which code may shape the law.
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Trapped in Time? Finding Innovation in the Electoral Process
Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law: Special Issue on Election 43
The paper seeks to capture the role of innovation in the electoral realm; more specifically, to understand the inherent tensions found between technological innovation and the voting process. It has been contested that voting mechanisms have faced little to no challenge to innovate; that instead, voting procedures are rather unsusceptible to the pressures of technological change. This appears as peculiar given that technology has had the capacity to permeate and implant itself across nearly all…
The paper seeks to capture the role of innovation in the electoral realm; more specifically, to understand the inherent tensions found between technological innovation and the voting process. It has been contested that voting mechanisms have faced little to no challenge to innovate; that instead, voting procedures are rather unsusceptible to the pressures of technological change. This appears as peculiar given that technology has had the capacity to permeate and implant itself across nearly all facets of society. What makes elections – specifically the voting process – untouchable by technological innovation? Are structures inherent to voting and the voting process unique relative to other forms of life?
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Book Review: The Lure of Greatness
Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law
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Playing the Trump Card: The Judiciary as the Citizen's Last Line of Defense
Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law Volume 11, Issue 1
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A Critical Assessment of Supreme Court Judicial Reasoning: The Constitutionality of Health Care Policies in Canada
Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law Volume 10, Issue 2
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Campaign Promises: Truth and Lies
Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law: Special Issue
Breaking the stigma on the fulfillment of campaign promises and its use as an effective tool for accountability: from the campaign trail to the term(s) in office with a focus on the Canadian electoral climate
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Effectual Linkages between Campaign Promises and Electoral Accountability
Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law Volume 8 Issue 3
Campaign promises affect voters' expectations about what policies will be chosen by an elected official, providing a benchmark for voters to link policy decisions with future re-election. Campaigns are often considered the most direct point of contact between politicians and the electorate over matters of public policy. In liberal democracies, governments are responsible and bound to the interests of their citizens. Voters may condition future elections based on whether or not the incumbent…
Campaign promises affect voters' expectations about what policies will be chosen by an elected official, providing a benchmark for voters to link policy decisions with future re-election. Campaigns are often considered the most direct point of contact between politicians and the electorate over matters of public policy. In liberal democracies, governments are responsible and bound to the interests of their citizens. Voters may condition future elections based on whether or not the incumbent candidate has fulfilled the promise made from the past election. If the candidate has shown to renege on promises, the electorate has the power to punish candidates by voting them out of office. This, then, is a mechanism of accountability to ensure that promises are kept and creates congruence between the vote and the expected policy. The degree to which elected officials keep their promises have strong implications on democratic accountability and also places significant value to voting.
Honors & Awards
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Laura Bassi Scholarship
Editing Press
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Loblaw Scholarship Program
Loblaw Companies Limited
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Procter and Gamble Scholarship
Procter and Gamble
4 year scholarship for excellence in academics
Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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French
Professional working proficiency
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Cantonese
Full professional proficiency
More activity by Dr. Megan
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Building an Advanced Knowledge Assistant 📚🤖 RAG was just the beginning. A huge theme we’ve noticed this year is the prevalence of companies…
Building an Advanced Knowledge Assistant 📚🤖 RAG was just the beginning. A huge theme we’ve noticed this year is the prevalence of companies…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Palo Alto was a surprising place. At first sight - an especially calm city with pleasant weather and beautiful houses, giving the curious…
Palo Alto was a surprising place. At first sight - an especially calm city with pleasant weather and beautiful houses, giving the curious…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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De retour du hackathon LLM x Law @ Stanford University : quand l'IA rencontre le droit pour innover 🚀⚖️ Quelle expérience incroyable que de…
De retour du hackathon LLM x Law @ Stanford University : quand l'IA rencontre le droit pour innover 🚀⚖️ Quelle expérience incroyable que de…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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📝 Is your business spending countless hours on proofreading? Discover how Upstage's #SolarProofread can help media companies achieve 79% accuracy…
📝 Is your business spending countless hours on proofreading? Discover how Upstage's #SolarProofread can help media companies achieve 79% accuracy…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Huge thank you to Camille Vasquez for elevating our LEX Summit experience! 💥 Thank you for giving us a peek behind the curtain of high profile…
Huge thank you to Camille Vasquez for elevating our LEX Summit experience! 💥 Thank you for giving us a peek behind the curtain of high profile…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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No need for multiple GPUs, no external APIs, and complete data privacy We are excited to announce Solar Pro Preview 🚀: the most intelligent LLM on…
No need for multiple GPUs, no external APIs, and complete data privacy We are excited to announce Solar Pro Preview 🚀: the most intelligent LLM on…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Just arrived in SF 🌉 yesterday evening for the LLMs in Production meetup after a few days in the Bay. Hey 👋 Yann Leger Laurie Voss Roie…
Just arrived in SF 🌉 yesterday evening for the LLMs in Production meetup after a few days in the Bay. Hey 👋 Yann Leger Laurie Voss Roie…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Let's explore the future of #LegalTech together. Our 7th annual LegalTech Workshop is only 2 weeks away! Learn more and register…
Let's explore the future of #LegalTech together. Our 7th annual LegalTech Workshop is only 2 weeks away! Learn more and register…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Thrilled to announce I’ve joined SpotDraft’s advisory board! I've had the pleasure of getting to know the SpotDraft team after doing the keynote…
Thrilled to announce I’ve joined SpotDraft’s advisory board! I've had the pleasure of getting to know the SpotDraft team after doing the keynote…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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This weekend, the boundaries of LegalTech were pushed for the 4th time at Stanford University LLM x Law Hackathon that inspired the hackathon in…
This weekend, the boundaries of LegalTech were pushed for the 4th time at Stanford University LLM x Law Hackathon that inspired the hackathon in…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Incredible energy today at Stanford's AI x law hackathon #4. I can't wait to see what all these great teams will come-up with, especially using…
Incredible energy today at Stanford's AI x law hackathon #4. I can't wait to see what all these great teams will come-up with, especially using…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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I am looking forward to giving the keynote address at Singapore Management University at the Computational Legal Studies Conference this Thursday…
I am looking forward to giving the keynote address at Singapore Management University at the Computational Legal Studies Conference this Thursday…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Save The Date! The Minnesota AI Community is pleased to announce our October in-person meeting date and speaker Damien Riehl. Artificial…
Save The Date! The Minnesota AI Community is pleased to announce our October in-person meeting date and speaker Damien Riehl. Artificial…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Legal teams large and small have spent much of the past year researching, testing, and developing applications of Generative AI to solve various pain…
Legal teams large and small have spent much of the past year researching, testing, and developing applications of Generative AI to solve various pain…
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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Congratulations to Norm Ai and unstructured.io for their inclusion in Business Insider's list of the most promising AI startups of 2024!
Congratulations to Norm Ai and unstructured.io for their inclusion in Business Insider's list of the most promising AI startups of 2024!
Liked by Dr. Megan Ma
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