Menu
Predictive Analytics
When Data Confounds Our Intuition
February 23, 2016
These blindspots confuse us. And when prompted with data that confounds our expectations, only 10% of the time will we trust the data rather than our intuition, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Decisive Actions: How Businesses Make Decisions report. 57% of the time, survey respondents would reanalyze the data to ensure no issue with data collection or math errors. Our ultimate goal with data is to defeat bias. In the “Philosophy of Data,” New York Times Op-Ed columnist David...
February 23, 2016
These blindspots confuse us. And when prompted with data that confounds our expectations, only 10% of the time will we trust the data rather than our intuition, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Decisive Actions: How Businesses Make Decisions report. 57% of the time, survey respondents would reanalyze the data to ensure no issue with data collection or math errors. Our ultimate goal with data is to defeat bias. In the “Philosophy of Data,” New York Times Op-Ed columnist David...
Forecasting Domestic Violence: A Machine Learning Approach to Help Inform Arraignment Decisions
February 23, 2016
Arguably the most important decision at an arraignment is whether to release an offender until the date of his or her next scheduled court appearance. Under the Bail Reform Act of 1984, threats to public safety can be a key factor in that decision. Implicitly, a forecast of “future dangerousness” is required. In this article, we consider in particular whether usefully accurate forecasts of domestic violence can be obtained. We apply machine learning to data on over 28,000 arraignment cases from...
February 23, 2016
Arguably the most important decision at an arraignment is whether to release an offender until the date of his or her next scheduled court appearance. Under the Bail Reform Act of 1984, threats to public safety can be a key factor in that decision. Implicitly, a forecast of “future dangerousness” is required. In this article, we consider in particular whether usefully accurate forecasts of domestic violence can be obtained. We apply machine learning to data on over 28,000 arraignment cases from...
SEC Investigations and Securities Class Actions: An Empirical Comparison
February 22, 2016
Using actions with both an SEC investigation and a class action as our baseline, we compare the targeting of SEC-only investigations...
February 22, 2016
Using actions with both an SEC investigation and a class action as our baseline, we compare the targeting of SEC-only investigations...
Algorithmic Contracts by Lauren Henry Scholz
February 22, 2016
Recently, I had the good fortune to interact with Lauren Henry Scholz, currently Resident Fellow and Knight Law and Media Scholar at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Scholz’s in-progress article, Algorithmic Contracts, addresses topics that will be of great interest to many readers of this blog. She not only tackles the fiscally important development of technological automation of contracting processes, but she also wades into the significant implications of computer-facilitated...
February 22, 2016
Recently, I had the good fortune to interact with Lauren Henry Scholz, currently Resident Fellow and Knight Law and Media Scholar at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Scholz’s in-progress article, Algorithmic Contracts, addresses topics that will be of great interest to many readers of this blog. She not only tackles the fiscally important development of technological automation of contracting processes, but she also wades into the significant implications of computer-facilitated...
Harvard Prepares Students To Thrive In A Disrupted Legal Profession
February 21, 2016
Harvard Law Bulletin (Fall 2015), The Laws of Adaptation: Change is coming to the legal profession—whether attorneys like it or not—and HLS is at the forefront of efforts to anticipate it, and prepare students. The warning bells have been ringing for at least two decades: The legal profession as we’ve known it is doomed, and lawyers must adapt—or face extinction. For the most part, these dire predictions have been ignored, even as globalization and technology have revolutionized markets,...
February 21, 2016
Harvard Law Bulletin (Fall 2015), The Laws of Adaptation: Change is coming to the legal profession—whether attorneys like it or not—and HLS is at the forefront of efforts to anticipate it, and prepare students. The warning bells have been ringing for at least two decades: The legal profession as we’ve known it is doomed, and lawyers must adapt—or face extinction. For the most part, these dire predictions have been ignored, even as globalization and technology have revolutionized markets,...
New Lex Machina Feature Corrects Erroneous Lawyer Listings in PACER
February 19, 2016
Legal analytics company Lex Machina — which LexisNexis acquired in November — is introducing a new feature today that...
February 19, 2016
Legal analytics company Lex Machina — which LexisNexis acquired in November — is introducing a new feature today that...
Judicial Retirements and the Staying Power of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions
February 18, 2016
The influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions depends critically on how these opinions are received and treated by lower courts, which decide the vast majority of legal disputes. We argue that the retirement of justices on the Supreme Court serves as a simple heuristic device for lower court judges in deciding how much deference to show to Supreme Court precedent. Using a unique data set of the treatment of all Supreme Court majority opinions in the courts of appeals from 1953 to 2012, we find...
February 18, 2016
The influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions depends critically on how these opinions are received and treated by lower courts, which decide the vast majority of legal disputes. We argue that the retirement of justices on the Supreme Court serves as a simple heuristic device for lower court judges in deciding how much deference to show to Supreme Court precedent. Using a unique data set of the treatment of all Supreme Court majority opinions in the courts of appeals from 1953 to 2012, we find...
Software Detects CEO Emotions, Predicts Financial Performance
February 17, 2016
Computer programs that scan facial expressions have been used to detect whether people respond positively to commercials or whether hospital patients are in pain. Can they also read a CEO’s mind? James Cicon thinks they can. A finance professor at University of Central Missouri, Cicon built software that analyzed video of the faces of Fortune 500 executives for signs of emotions like fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. The emotions, he found, correlated with profit margins, returns on assets,...
February 17, 2016
Computer programs that scan facial expressions have been used to detect whether people respond positively to commercials or whether hospital patients are in pain. Can they also read a CEO’s mind? James Cicon thinks they can. A finance professor at University of Central Missouri, Cicon built software that analyzed video of the faces of Fortune 500 executives for signs of emotions like fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. The emotions, he found, correlated with profit margins, returns on assets,...
People Prefer System 2 Nudges (Kind Of)
February 16, 2016
In the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, those involved in law and policy have been exploring choice-preserving approaches, or “nudges,” informed by behavioral science and with the purpose of promoting important public policy goals, such as improved health and safety. But there is a large and insufficiently explored difference between System 1 nudges, which target or benefit from automatic processing, and System 2 nudges, which target or benefit from deliberative processing. Graphic...
February 16, 2016
In the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, those involved in law and policy have been exploring choice-preserving approaches, or “nudges,” informed by behavioral science and with the purpose of promoting important public policy goals, such as improved health and safety. But there is a large and insufficiently explored difference between System 1 nudges, which target or benefit from automatic processing, and System 2 nudges, which target or benefit from deliberative processing. Graphic...
PTAB Favourable to Patent Owners, Lex Machina Report Shows
February 15, 2016
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) may not be the “death squad for patents” it was once described as, with a report...
February 15, 2016
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) may not be the “death squad for patents” it was once described as, with a report...
