We investigate the credibility of non-binding pre-play statements about cooperative behavior, using data from a high-stakes TV game show in which contestants play a variant on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. We depart from the conventional binary approach of classifying statements as promises or not, and propose a more fine-grained two-by-two typology inspired by the idea that lying aversion leads defectors to prefer statements that are malleable to ex-post interpretation as truths. Our empirical...
Over the last 30 years, legal scholars have increasingly deployed experimental studies, particularly hypothetical scenarios, to test intuitions about legal reasoning and behavior. That movement has accelerated in the last decade, facilitated in large part by cheap and convenient Internet participant recruiting platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. The widespread use of online subjects, a practice that dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for experimental research, has been controversial. At the same...
Penn also emphasized the importance of process in the context of improving the workflows of her lawyers. She showed a pyramid where the wide base of Process Improvement held up everything else, including the smallest tip at the top where law and legal strategy came into play. She illustrated this by sharing a picture of a whiteboard with colored Post-It notes neatly arranged mapping out a process during a meeting with one of her firm partners. After they completed that mapping exercise, the partner...
The number of artificial intelligence companies catering to the legal field has grown by 65 percent in the last year, from 40 to 66.
This finding is from the In-House Counsel’s LegalTech Buyer’s Guide 2018, published today by the contract review automation company LawGeex.
The increase in AI companies includes a number of “agile and well-funded startups,” says the guide, but also a number of established players that are joining the field, such as LexisNexis with its Lexis Answers...
NBA playoff series are chess matches. So it’s a good thing that Klay Thompson really, really loves chess.
Thompson plays chess as often as he plays basketball: almost every day. “It’s a great game,” he said. He owns multiple chess boards at home. He carries a magnetic chess set on road trips. And he juggles several chess games on his phone, which is a problem for Thompson: He’s not good at chess on his phone.
What he appreciates most about chess are the moments when...
Maslow’s most penetrating idea is that we have a hierarchy of needs, proceeding from physiological needs like water or warmth, through safety, love, esteem and then self-actualisation. He argued that lower needs occupy our attention when they are unmet and make it more difficult to fulfil the higher ones – including self-actualisation, which is about becoming the self you always had the potential to be.
Compton first deals with the charge that this work is ascientific. He finds there is a lack...
In important contexts, people prefer option A to option B when they evaluate the two separately, but prefer option B to option A when they evaluate the two jointly. In consumer behavior, politics, and law, such preference reversals present serious puzzles about rationality and behavioral biases. They are often a product of the pervasive problem of "evaluability." Some important characteristics of options are difficult or impossible to assess in separate evaluation, and hence choosers disregard or downplay...
When firms were asked whether they had specifically tasked anyone with responsibility for innovation, 29.7 percent answered yes. Large law firms of 500 or more lawyers were more than twice as likely to have such a person, with 55.9 percent answering yes.
Whether firms have tasked anyone with innovation, by size.
Firms were also asked about which technologies had the greatest impact on efficiency. The top five technologies that firms said had either a moderate or high impact on efficiency...
When last we wrote about judicial analytics company Gavelytics on March 13, it was announcing a $3.2 million funding round to support development of new features and expansion into additional jurisdictions. Today, the first two of these new features roll out — a rulings database and an arbitrator archive.
With today’s enhancements, Gavelytics adds two features:
Trial court rulings. This databases includes thousands of Los Angeles trial court orders dating back to 2000....