Predictive Analytics
Sunstein on Popular Support for Nudges
June 2, 2015
Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) has posted Do People Like Nudges? on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate about the ethical questions associated with “nudges,” understood as approaches that steer people in certain directions while fully maintaining freedom of choice. Evidence about people’s views cannot resolve the ethical questions, but in democratic societies, those views will inevitably affect what governments are willing to do. Existing...
June 2, 2015
Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) has posted Do People Like Nudges? on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate about the ethical questions associated with “nudges,” understood as approaches that steer people in certain directions while fully maintaining freedom of choice. Evidence about people’s views cannot resolve the ethical questions, but in democratic societies, those views will inevitably affect what governments are willing to do. Existing...
Law Without Lawyers: Access to Civil Justice and the Cost of Legal Services
June 1, 2015
This Article will discuss access to justice as a function of the cost of civil litigation. Framing the issue in this way, justice as a function of cost, it is worth noting that justice and cost are two of the three goals referenced in Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which states: “These rules . . . should be construed and administered to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.”The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, in positing these...
June 1, 2015
This Article will discuss access to justice as a function of the cost of civil litigation. Framing the issue in this way, justice as a function of cost, it is worth noting that justice and cost are two of the three goals referenced in Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which states: “These rules . . . should be construed and administered to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.”The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, in positing these...
Googling Gives Illusion of Knowledge Even When The Search Reveals Nothing!
May 31, 2015
Even when an internet search is unsuccessful, people feel they know more. Searching the internet makes people feel they know more than they really do, a new study finds. And it doesn’t seem to matter much that people don’t actually find the information for which they were searching. Matthew Fisher, who led the research, said: “The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips. It...
May 31, 2015
Even when an internet search is unsuccessful, people feel they know more. Searching the internet makes people feel they know more than they really do, a new study finds. And it doesn’t seem to matter much that people don’t actually find the information for which they were searching. Matthew Fisher, who led the research, said: “The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips. It...
Can the Legal System be Moneyballed?
May 31, 2015
A Florida-based AI firm has released some very interesting revelations about lawyers and their rates of prevailing in lawsuits. The firm, Premonition, has determined that lawyers — even those on ‘top lawyer lists’, or considered by peers to be among the best — generally have average results. The company also discovered that lawyers and law firms don’t actually keep track of win/loss data: they mostly track fees and billing proportions. One indicative statistic kind of jumps out as a condemnation...
May 31, 2015
A Florida-based AI firm has released some very interesting revelations about lawyers and their rates of prevailing in lawsuits. The firm, Premonition, has determined that lawyers — even those on ‘top lawyer lists’, or considered by peers to be among the best — generally have average results. The company also discovered that lawyers and law firms don’t actually keep track of win/loss data: they mostly track fees and billing proportions. One indicative statistic kind of jumps out as a condemnation...
Epstein on Incomplete Contracts
May 29, 2015
Wendy Netter Epstein (DePaul University - College of Law) has posted Facilitating Incomplete Contracts (Case Western Reserve Law Review, Vol. 65, No. 2, 2014) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Contract law abhors incompleteness. Although no contract can be entirely complete, the idea of a purposefully incomplete or underspecified contract is antithetical to lawyers’ ideals of certainty for the parties and for the law. Indeed, contract law is designed to incentivize parties to specifically articulate...
May 29, 2015
Wendy Netter Epstein (DePaul University - College of Law) has posted Facilitating Incomplete Contracts (Case Western Reserve Law Review, Vol. 65, No. 2, 2014) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Contract law abhors incompleteness. Although no contract can be entirely complete, the idea of a purposefully incomplete or underspecified contract is antithetical to lawyers’ ideals of certainty for the parties and for the law. Indeed, contract law is designed to incentivize parties to specifically articulate...
Schweizer on Proportionality & Nudging
May 28, 2015
Mark Schweizer (Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences - Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) has posted Nudging and the Principle of Proportionality (Klaus Mathis (ed.), Economic Analysis of Law in European Legal Scholarship, Springer (Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: While the ethics and politics of nudging have received a great deal of attention, the legality of non-coercive interventions aimed at changing human behavior has received less attention....
May 28, 2015
Mark Schweizer (Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences - Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) has posted Nudging and the Principle of Proportionality (Klaus Mathis (ed.), Economic Analysis of Law in European Legal Scholarship, Springer (Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: While the ethics and politics of nudging have received a great deal of attention, the legality of non-coercive interventions aimed at changing human behavior has received less attention....
Checkmate: Early Moves Define Negotiation
May 27, 2015
The Litigation Section of the State Bar of Texas recently published Don Philbin’s article entitled “Checkmate: Early Moves Define Negotiation Outcomes” in its newsletter. In his article, the Chair of the Texas Bar’sADR Section discusses the insight predictive analytics can provide to negotiators. According to Mr. Philbin, negotiations typically follow predictable social conventions and, much like chess, the first few moves are likely to set the board. In addition, advanced analytics suggest: Anchoring...
May 27, 2015
The Litigation Section of the State Bar of Texas recently published Don Philbin’s article entitled “Checkmate: Early Moves Define Negotiation Outcomes” in its newsletter. In his article, the Chair of the Texas Bar’sADR Section discusses the insight predictive analytics can provide to negotiators. According to Mr. Philbin, negotiations typically follow predictable social conventions and, much like chess, the first few moves are likely to set the board. In addition, advanced analytics suggest: Anchoring...
Dentons Invests in New Tech Through NextLaw Labs
May 25, 2015
Dentons is to invest in and test new technology from around the world under a newly-launched venture called NextLaw Labs. NextLaw Labs, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dentons, will focus on developing and investing in new products, services and fledgling technology companies, with the ambitious goal to “transform the practice of law.” The plan is for NextLaw Labs to develop a suite of technologies using Dentons lawyers as a global testing ground for new products. Dentons is set to become...
May 25, 2015
Dentons is to invest in and test new technology from around the world under a newly-launched venture called NextLaw Labs. NextLaw Labs, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dentons, will focus on developing and investing in new products, services and fledgling technology companies, with the ambitious goal to “transform the practice of law.” The plan is for NextLaw Labs to develop a suite of technologies using Dentons lawyers as a global testing ground for new products. Dentons is set to become...
The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services
May 25, 2015
Law is an information technology—a code that regulates social life. In our age, the machinery of information technology is growing exponentially in power, not only in hardware, but also in the software capacity of the programs that run on computers. As a result, the legal profession faces a great disruption. Information technology has already had a huge impact on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in the last eight...
May 25, 2015
Law is an information technology—a code that regulates social life. In our age, the machinery of information technology is growing exponentially in power, not only in hardware, but also in the software capacity of the programs that run on computers. As a result, the legal profession faces a great disruption. Information technology has already had a huge impact on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in the last eight...
Software Eats the Legal Profession
May 24, 2015
Marc Andreessen quipped in 2011: “Software is eating the world”. The legal profession is not immune from this development. Law has a high information component. In a large sense, law is information or as Bill Palin, the young lawyer who won the ABA’s Legal Hackathon at last year’s ABA Annual Meeting, says, Law is Code. We are already seeing how Andreesen’s prediction is working its way through the legal profession. We are still at the beginning of the beginning of these developments,...
May 24, 2015
Marc Andreessen quipped in 2011: “Software is eating the world”. The legal profession is not immune from this development. Law has a high information component. In a large sense, law is information or as Bill Palin, the young lawyer who won the ABA’s Legal Hackathon at last year’s ABA Annual Meeting, says, Law is Code. We are already seeing how Andreesen’s prediction is working its way through the legal profession. We are still at the beginning of the beginning of these developments,...
