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Texas Courts Passion for Arbitration Continues in Payday Lender & Dallas Topless Club Cases
March 12, 2018
Proponents of binding mandatory arbitration scored two huge victories this week in the Texas appellate courts. In two separate and unrelated rulings, the Texas Supreme Court and the Dallas Court of Appeals ordered plaintiffs in two cases – a group of customers alleging they were illegally victimized by a payday lender and an exotic dancer suing a strip club for gross negligence – to litigate their claims through private arbitration instead of the public court system.
March 12, 2018
Proponents of binding mandatory arbitration scored two huge victories this week in the Texas appellate courts. In two separate and unrelated rulings, the Texas Supreme Court and the Dallas Court of Appeals ordered plaintiffs in two cases – a group of customers alleging they were illegally victimized by a payday lender and an exotic dancer suing a strip club for gross negligence – to litigate their claims through private arbitration instead of the public court system.
Empathy
March 12, 2018
Conflict is stressful and triggers negative emotions. Mediation can add another layer of anxiety. Clients are usually fearful about confronting each other – afraid of the other’s anger and of humiliation, and worried whether they will be able to control their own emotions. An empathic mediator may in effect function as an attachment figure, a ‘secure base’ enabling parties to both enter and remain in the room. The mediator’s empathy helps clients reduce their level of emotional arousal....
March 12, 2018
Conflict is stressful and triggers negative emotions. Mediation can add another layer of anxiety. Clients are usually fearful about confronting each other – afraid of the other’s anger and of humiliation, and worried whether they will be able to control their own emotions. An empathic mediator may in effect function as an attachment figure, a ‘secure base’ enabling parties to both enter and remain in the room. The mediator’s empathy helps clients reduce their level of emotional arousal....
AI Is Besting Human Lawyers at Parsing Contracts. What Do Lawyers Think?
March 11, 2018
The results of the study—which was administered by independent attorney Christopher Ray and involved a stable of high-profile legal scholars—are striking. Using five nondisclosure agreements from the Enron data set as the baseline, 20 lawyers were pitted against LawGeex’s AI in parsing 30 provisions. On average, the LawGeex software achieved an accuracy rate of 94 percent. The humans? An average of 85 percent. Here’s the real kicker: The fastest human attorney completed the task in 51 minutes....
March 11, 2018
The results of the study—which was administered by independent attorney Christopher Ray and involved a stable of high-profile legal scholars—are striking. Using five nondisclosure agreements from the Enron data set as the baseline, 20 lawyers were pitted against LawGeex’s AI in parsing 30 provisions. On average, the LawGeex software achieved an accuracy rate of 94 percent. The humans? An average of 85 percent. Here’s the real kicker: The fastest human attorney completed the task in 51 minutes....
Tax Law Makes Divorce More Miserable
March 11, 2018
From Bloomberg: The new tax law could make divorce an even more miserable experience, according to a new survey of the nation’s top matrimonial attorneys. Almost two thirds of respondents said they expect divorce negotiations to become more acrimonious following a change to the tax treatment of alimony, a poll by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers showed. The new law includes a controversial provision that scraps the tax break divorcees get for paying alimony -- starting for divorces...
March 11, 2018
From Bloomberg: The new tax law could make divorce an even more miserable experience, according to a new survey of the nation’s top matrimonial attorneys. Almost two thirds of respondents said they expect divorce negotiations to become more acrimonious following a change to the tax treatment of alimony, a poll by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers showed. The new law includes a controversial provision that scraps the tax break divorcees get for paying alimony -- starting for divorces...
Waymo Robot Cars Need Little Human Help as GM Makes Big Leap
March 10, 2018
Self-driving cars developed by Waymo need less human backup than rivals – though General Motors Co.’s vehicles are improving fast. The Alphabet Inc. unit’s cars drove in autonomous mode for more than 352,000 miles on California public roads last year, and engineers took control just 63 times, according to a report filed to the state. Waymo and GM both disengaged their self-driving systems less than once per 1,000 miles during testing.
March 10, 2018
Self-driving cars developed by Waymo need less human backup than rivals – though General Motors Co.’s vehicles are improving fast. The Alphabet Inc. unit’s cars drove in autonomous mode for more than 352,000 miles on California public roads last year, and engineers took control just 63 times, according to a report filed to the state. Waymo and GM both disengaged their self-driving systems less than once per 1,000 miles during testing.
Assessing Cardiovascular Risk Factors with Computer Vision
March 10, 2018
Heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular (CV) diseases continue to be among the top public health issues. Assessing...
March 10, 2018
Heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular (CV) diseases continue to be among the top public health issues. Assessing...
Employing AI
March 9, 2018
Imagine that, today or in the not-so-distant-future, a company desires to take full advantage of the developments of artificial intelligence by effectively delegating all its hiring decisions to a computer. It gives the computer only one instruction: “Pick good employees.” Taking “Big Data” to the logical extreme, the computer is also provided with all the employer’s available data and empowered to find whatever data it might consider relevant on the web. Thought experiments, such as this...
March 9, 2018
Imagine that, today or in the not-so-distant-future, a company desires to take full advantage of the developments of artificial intelligence by effectively delegating all its hiring decisions to a computer. It gives the computer only one instruction: “Pick good employees.” Taking “Big Data” to the logical extreme, the computer is also provided with all the employer’s available data and empowered to find whatever data it might consider relevant on the web. Thought experiments, such as this...
The Immovable Elephant: Motivating Lawyers Toward Early ADR Efforts
March 9, 2018
As Chip and Dan Heath describe in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, we are rational beings with a “Rider” that logically analyzes our surroundings. Our Rider tries to direct our emotional side, “the Elephant.” Although we like to think our Rider is in control at all times, in truth, the Elephant is in charge much of the time. Data concerning the benefits of early case assessment and planned early dispute resolution may be appealing to the Rider, but if the Elephant...
March 9, 2018
As Chip and Dan Heath describe in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, we are rational beings with a “Rider” that logically analyzes our surroundings. Our Rider tries to direct our emotional side, “the Elephant.” Although we like to think our Rider is in control at all times, in truth, the Elephant is in charge much of the time. Data concerning the benefits of early case assessment and planned early dispute resolution may be appealing to the Rider, but if the Elephant...
“Critical Thinking” by Tversky & Liberman
March 8, 2018
The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Critical Thinking: Statistical Reasoning and Intuitive Judgment by Amos Tversky & Varda Liberman on SSRN. Here is a description: Life is fundamentally uncertain. We do not know whether it will rain, whether the market will go up or down, whether our unhealthy eating choices will have serious consequences, or whether terrorists will strike our city. To make matters worse, we also lack a tried and true procedure for evaluating the likelihood of such...
March 8, 2018
The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Critical Thinking: Statistical Reasoning and Intuitive Judgment by Amos Tversky & Varda Liberman on SSRN. Here is a description: Life is fundamentally uncertain. We do not know whether it will rain, whether the market will go up or down, whether our unhealthy eating choices will have serious consequences, or whether terrorists will strike our city. To make matters worse, we also lack a tried and true procedure for evaluating the likelihood of such...
Sorry, Arbitration Agreements Are Not For The Courts’ Benefit
March 8, 2018
The Supreme Court of Nebraska gave an unpleasant surprise to its trial court judges last week: they cannot enforce arbitration agreements sua sponte. Boyd v. Cook, 298 Neb. 819 (Feb. 2, 2018). The case involved a messy shareholder dispute. A key contract to the dispute contained an arbitration provision covering “any dispute or controversy arising out of” the agreement. The suit began in April of 2014, and eventually included many parties and at least a dozen claims. In 2016,...
March 8, 2018
The Supreme Court of Nebraska gave an unpleasant surprise to its trial court judges last week: they cannot enforce arbitration agreements sua sponte. Boyd v. Cook, 298 Neb. 819 (Feb. 2, 2018). The case involved a messy shareholder dispute. A key contract to the dispute contained an arbitration provision covering “any dispute or controversy arising out of” the agreement. The suit began in April of 2014, and eventually included many parties and at least a dozen claims. In 2016,...
