the intersection of law and technology
Matt Levine is awesome. The first topic of his editorial is just fantastic. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter oped newspaper thing, you’re very much missing out. You don’t even need to subscribe to Bloomberg to get it for free gratis!
The article does a great job of capturing the job of thinking like a lawyer – and where people go wrong on their thinking.
I found this Slate Money podcast fascinating. A lot of this is about the abdication of morals in the process of growing a business – and how business schools and consultancies have helped this along.
I’m sure my enjoyment of this is wrapped up in my belief that in-house lawyers are now the moral core of a company and have a prominent role in manipulating guiding the company into doing the “right” thing.
I’ve definitely found this true in my career, what about you?
So this is bad:
On Thursday, a team of scientists offered a detailed accounting of how marine life was wiped out during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Global warming robbed the oceans of oxygen, they say, putting many species under so much stress that they died off.
And we may be repeating the process, the scientists warn. If so, then climate change is “solidly in the category of a catastrophic extinction event,” said Curtis Deutsch, an earth scientist at the University of Washington and co-author of the new study, published in the journal Science.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-mass-extinction.html
Feels like this should be bigger news.
This from Forbes:
Blockchain is the latest innovation to take over vacation planning. It’s expected to disrupt the industry as much as when Expedia, Airbnb, and Priceline took vacation planning online.
A company is attempting to apply blockchain to the travel industry. To be successful it needs to outcompete other entrenched rivals such as Expedia, Airbnb, and Priceline in a historically very low margin business. At the time of this writing, blockchain has not been found to be a competitive advantage in any industry outside of blackmarket transactions.
From Law360 (paywall):
“The data-driven lawyer is the lawyer of the future,” said Josh Becker, Lexis head of legal analytics and chairman of Lex Machina. “This is still very early days and these pioneers are critical. They’re evangelists within their firms and they bring data with them each step of the way.”
To save you the subscription, Law360 (which is owned by the same parent as Lex Machina), says lawyers using data is the future.
Just so you’re aware. Lawyers have always used data, and those that used it better usually got ahead. In 2007 you might build a script to download info from the USPTO, and in 2018 you now might pay a subscription fee for someone to do that for you. This has been going on forever, you’ve only added marketing.
And, from what I’ve seen from Lex Machina (which is now dated by a few years) I’m unimpressed. At that time, it could tell you an insight such as: only 10% of motions to dismiss have been granted in a certain jurisdiction. So what? That’s still a 10% chance. It’s a shot on goal.
The future for lawyers is competency and intelligence. Let’s make that happen.
Somewhat of an old story raised anew this past month. The use of AI to identify tattoos and what they mean. This raises all sorts of serious concerns as pointed out in the article (but take with a grain of salt given the advocacy group behind it).
I just like the idea of this needing to be explained in court as a way to establish reasonable suspicion or probable cause. There are ways to get around that need by just using police officer testimony, but someone is going to go after the algorithm.