I Added Merit Systems Protection Board and Union Contracts Databases
There is also now an MSPB AI Research Assistant.
As regular readers know, NLRB Edge is an extension of a larger project of mine to use Large Language Models to make labor law more accessible. The larger project’s home is at NLRBResearch.com. In the last couple of weeks, there have been some significant updates to that project that I wanted to notify NLRB Edge readers about.
First, in addition to the NLRB Law and NLRB Dockets databases, I have added MSPB Law and Union Contracts databases.
The MSPB Law database is basically the same thing as the NLRB Law database except for the Merit Systems Protection Board. It contains:
Every MSPB decision ever decided — both precedential and nonprecedential decisions.
Every Federal Circuit decision that uses the phrase “Merit Systems Protection Board.” Federal Circuit decisions are precedential for the MSPB.
Every Circuit Court and Supreme Court decision that uses the phrase “Merit Systems Protection Board.”
All of the relevant statutory and regulatory text for the MSPB.
Selected MSPB agency guidance.
The Union Contracts database is an ever-growing collection of collective-bargaining agreements that is being scraped from the internet. Because CBAs are strewn across the web in an unstructured way, constructing this database relies heavily on LLMs to go out on the web and find PDFs of CBAs and then add them to the database. At present, there are 2,097 CBAs and the database is growing by about 5 to 10 contracts a day. All of the CBAs in the Union Contracts database are full-text searchable, meaning that you can search through them to find examples of contract language for pretty much anything that might go into a CBA (e.g. “progressive discipline”).
Second, I have created an MSPB AI Research Assistant that is similar to my NLRB AI Research Assistant. If you sign up for the free trial here, I will email you both assistants with instructions on how to use them. The short instructions are that you load the emailed files into the Claude chatbot, then you trigger the bots with any question you have about the NLRB or MSPB, which will then cause the bots to search through my databases to find an answer and write you a memo with all of its sources cited, linked, and quoted. Those who have already signed up for the free trial will be receiving an email today or tomorrow with the new MSPB AI Research Assistant as well as an updated NLRB AI Research Assistant.
Finally, I wanted to share a recent video I posted of me using my NLRB Research Assistant to scrutinize the arguments made by opposing counsel in a recent case I litigated. The goal of this video was to see if the NLRB Research Assistant would be able to spot a particular error that opposing counsel made (citing two overruled cases). It succeeded at that.
I think this video is a good illustration of the various creative ways that the NLRB Research Assistant can be used to improve your legal practice. In addition to asking it questions that it then researches and attempts to answer, you can also upload briefs filed by opponents and have it analyze their arguments. Similarly, you could upload your own arguments before filing them to get a double-check on their merits and vulnerabilities.
So far, all of the feedback on the tool has been positive and usage of it among those who have signed up for the free trial has also been high. So, if you have been interested but skeptical, now is the time to give it a try. (https://nlrbresearch.com/ai)
One last thing I will say on this, just because multiple people have asked, is that NLRBResearch.com does not store any user queries or other information being searched. The only thing it stores is timestamps of every time a particular account uses the research assistant. So if you are worried about privacy and case information being stored by a third-party service, I am not doing that and will not do that. With that said, what Anthropic/Claude may store is a separate matter and you should be attentive to those settings.