Keith Hylton has posted to SSRN Information Costs and the Civil Justice System. The abstract provides:
Litigation is costly because information is not free. Given that information is costly and perfect information prohibitively costly, courts will occasionally err. Finally, the fact that information is costly implies an unavoidable degree of informational asymmetry between disputants. This paper presents a model of the civil justice system that incorporates these features of the real world and probes...
Technological innovation has accelerated at an exponential pace in the last few decades, ushering in an era of unprecedented advancements in algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies. Traditionally, the legal field has protected itself from technological disruptions by maintaining a professional monopoly over legal work and limiting the “practice of law” to only those who are licensed.
This article analyzes the long-term impact of the Second Circuit’s opinion in Lola v. Skadden,...
There is a treasure trove of litigation data that for years was virtually inaccessible. While court rulings and filings were available and individual documents could be accessed and viewed, the technology needed to search and analyze the data and provide useful, actionable information simply did not exist.
In 2018, that’s no longer the case. The recent maturation of the foundational technologies needed to support machine learning have made advanced data analytics and sophisticated language processing...
In common‐law countries, legal precedent serves as a foundation of judicial opinions. Judges cite precedent to explain their decision, and it is this use of precedent that threads one decision to another. The Supreme Court in India stands in contrast to its counterparts in other countries in that it annually decides not dozens, but thousands, of cases. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly half the Court's decisions do not cite any precedent at all. This article examines this phenomenon, specifically...
What’s going on here? Gawande’s puzzle is that we seem not to evaluate the experience – good or bad – but rather report on a recollection of the experience. In describing medical experiences – certainly those involving some pain – patients recall either the worst or the most recent moment. An accounting of the experience at the time tends to differ from a recall of the total experience afterwards.
This is where Gawande turns to Kahneman who has researched and reported on research on this...
Recent developments include Big Four accounting firm EY’s acquisition of alternative legal service provider Riverview Law, a slew of legal technology-related activity at the International Legal Technology Association’s annual education conference in National Harbor, Maryland, and the launch of a new partnership between two law schools aimed at finding technology-based legal solutions to high eviction rates.
Forty years after the publication of the first systematic study of adverse medical events, there is greater access to information about adverse medical events and increasingly widespread acceptance of the view that patient safety requires more than vigilance by well-intentioned medical professionals. In this essay, we describe some of the ways that medical liability insurance organizations contributed to this transformation, and we catalog the roles that those organizations play in promoting patient...
If you need to wake up, caffeine can help. But for the optimal jolt, how much and when?
The U.S. Army and the Department of Defense have developed an algorithm to answer that question. It’s of critical interest because soldiers may go for days without getting enough sleep or, in some cases, any sleep at all.
A perfectly timed and ideal portion of caffeine can fend off fatigue that might otherwise jeopardize a mission or put lives at risk.
The infusion of ADR into legal training has been shaped by its ‘alternative’ identity, bringing with it a tendency to reinforce schisms: rights or interests, adversarial or collaborative approaches, litigation or settlement. "Either-or thinking" served its purpose in the early years but falls short especially with large-scale business files, where litigation looms and sophisticated clients expect multiple-pronged protective strategies. This article explores ways that settlement-oriented lawyers...