Blog Archives
How To Read Someone’s Emotions With 90% Accuracy
September 8, 2015
They found that negative emotions have a ‘neural signature’ which a computer could learn. Dr Luke Chang, who led the study, said: “This means that brain imaging has the potential to accurately uncover how someone is feeling without knowing anything about them other than their brain activity. This has enormous implications for improving our understanding of how emotions are generated and regulated, which have been notoriously difficult to define and measure. In addition, these new types...
September 8, 2015
They found that negative emotions have a ‘neural signature’ which a computer could learn. Dr Luke Chang, who led the study, said: “This means that brain imaging has the potential to accurately uncover how someone is feeling without knowing anything about them other than their brain activity. This has enormous implications for improving our understanding of how emotions are generated and regulated, which have been notoriously difficult to define and measure. In addition, these new types...
Data on Lawyer Malpractice
September 8, 2015
While legal scholars don't flinch at studying medical malpractice (for one recent example, click here), a similar focus on attorney malpractice has not yet emerged. To this end, in When the Lawyer Screws Up: A Portrait of Legal Malpractice Claims and Their Resolution, Bert Kritzer (Minnesota) and Neil Vidmar (Duke) present initial data that help outline the basic contours of attorney malpractice. While their analyses are largely descriptive, their initial findings point to "essentially two hemispheres...
September 8, 2015
While legal scholars don't flinch at studying medical malpractice (for one recent example, click here), a similar focus on attorney malpractice has not yet emerged. To this end, in When the Lawyer Screws Up: A Portrait of Legal Malpractice Claims and Their Resolution, Bert Kritzer (Minnesota) and Neil Vidmar (Duke) present initial data that help outline the basic contours of attorney malpractice. While their analyses are largely descriptive, their initial findings point to "essentially two hemispheres...
Predicting Major Geopolitical Events
September 7, 2015
The weekend of July 30, a group of intellectual heavyweights met at a beautiful vineyard in California's Napa Valley. Their agenda was modest: learn how to predict the future. The "class," organized by Edge, was led by Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who has made the study of prediction his life's work. For the past several years, Tetlock and his colleagues have been running a project supported by the US intelligence community. Their goal is to find ways to accurately...
September 7, 2015
The weekend of July 30, a group of intellectual heavyweights met at a beautiful vineyard in California's Napa Valley. Their agenda was modest: learn how to predict the future. The "class," organized by Edge, was led by Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who has made the study of prediction his life's work. For the past several years, Tetlock and his colleagues have been running a project supported by the US intelligence community. Their goal is to find ways to accurately...
WSJ asks “Do Law Schools Have it Too Easy?”
September 7, 2015
A follow-up story related to Steve Harper's NYT Op-Ed called "Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs." From the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: Law school enrollment has taken a big hit in recent years with entering classes shrinking by more than 25% between 2010 and 2014. Steven J. Harper, a former partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP and author of“The Lawyer Bubble,” says the decline isn’t steep enough. . . . . Mr. Harper thinks the amount of tuition that government guaranteed...
September 7, 2015
A follow-up story related to Steve Harper's NYT Op-Ed called "Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs." From the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: Law school enrollment has taken a big hit in recent years with entering classes shrinking by more than 25% between 2010 and 2014. Steven J. Harper, a former partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP and author of“The Lawyer Bubble,” says the decline isn’t steep enough. . . . . Mr. Harper thinks the amount of tuition that government guaranteed...
Microsoft Matter Center Boosting Productivity for Legal Professionals
September 7, 2015
Matter Center is a solution developed by Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs group that helps improve collaboration for legal professionals. We highlight it as a solution that builds on Office 365 and enhances its value as a productivity platform with scenarios relevant in the legal vertical. Microsoft is rolling Matter Center out to all of its legal professionals globally and we are pleased to make it available to our customers and partners via GitHub by the end of calendar year 2015. Microsoft...
September 7, 2015
Matter Center is a solution developed by Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs group that helps improve collaboration for legal professionals. We highlight it as a solution that builds on Office 365 and enhances its value as a productivity platform with scenarios relevant in the legal vertical. Microsoft is rolling Matter Center out to all of its legal professionals globally and we are pleased to make it available to our customers and partners via GitHub by the end of calendar year 2015. Microsoft...
Betting on #SCOTUS
September 6, 2015
My Lex Predict colleagues Daniel Katz and Mike Bommarito, along with Tyler Soellinger and James Chen, have published a fascinating study of how securities markets react to the Supreme Court. The authors find: Across all cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States between the 1999-2013 terms, we identify 79 cases where the share price of one or more publicly traded company moved in direct response to a Supreme Court decision. In the aggregate, over fifteen years, Supreme Court decisions...
September 6, 2015
My Lex Predict colleagues Daniel Katz and Mike Bommarito, along with Tyler Soellinger and James Chen, have published a fascinating study of how securities markets react to the Supreme Court. The authors find: Across all cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States between the 1999-2013 terms, we identify 79 cases where the share price of one or more publicly traded company moved in direct response to a Supreme Court decision. In the aggregate, over fifteen years, Supreme Court decisions...
Microsoft Launches its Practice Management Product for Lawyers
September 6, 2015
Matter Center was originally designed by Microsoft’s legal department for its own internal use and it is the tool the legal department uses today. In my earlier conversations with Microsoft executives, they denied that they would make the product available commercially directly to law firms and legal departments. Today’s announcement said that it has already shipped Matter Center to IT providers who specialize in serving the legal community, who are already offering it to their clients. These...
September 6, 2015
Matter Center was originally designed by Microsoft’s legal department for its own internal use and it is the tool the legal department uses today. In my earlier conversations with Microsoft executives, they denied that they would make the product available commercially directly to law firms and legal departments. Today’s announcement said that it has already shipped Matter Center to IT providers who specialize in serving the legal community, who are already offering it to their clients. These...
SCOTUS Justice Kagan Says Law Schools Must Do More to Boost Legal Writing Skills
September 6, 2015
In an interview last month with legal writing expert Bryan Garner (who is the editor of Black's Law Dictionary in addition to running his own legal writing consulting and training firm LawProse) Justice Elena Kagan told him that legal educators need "to think in a deep way" about how to improve law students' writing abilities. Justice Kagan also acknowledged that "writing is one of the hardest things to teach." Mr. Garner has posted videos of his interview with Justice Kagan on his website LawProse,...
September 6, 2015
In an interview last month with legal writing expert Bryan Garner (who is the editor of Black's Law Dictionary in addition to running his own legal writing consulting and training firm LawProse) Justice Elena Kagan told him that legal educators need "to think in a deep way" about how to improve law students' writing abilities. Justice Kagan also acknowledged that "writing is one of the hardest things to teach." Mr. Garner has posted videos of his interview with Justice Kagan on his website LawProse,...
A Retiring Law Professor’s Advice to Students
September 5, 2015
On the occasion of his retirement from academia, Professor John Lande of U. Missouri was asked to write an essay offering advice to the next generation of lawyers based on his experience as both a lawyer and teacher. The result, an article entitled My Last Lecture: More Unsolicited Advice for Future and Current Lawyers, is schedule for publication shortly in the Journal of Dispute Resolution. In the meantime, with the classes starting soon, you may want to consider sending this link to your students...
September 5, 2015
On the occasion of his retirement from academia, Professor John Lande of U. Missouri was asked to write an essay offering advice to the next generation of lawyers based on his experience as both a lawyer and teacher. The result, an article entitled My Last Lecture: More Unsolicited Advice for Future and Current Lawyers, is schedule for publication shortly in the Journal of Dispute Resolution. In the meantime, with the classes starting soon, you may want to consider sending this link to your students...
2015 ABA Tech Survey: 60% of Attorneys Use iPhone, 40% iPad
September 5, 2015
Every year, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center conducts a survey to gauge the use of legal technology by attorneys in the United States. This year's report was released this past Friday, and as always, I was particularly interested in Volume VI, titled Mobile Lawyers. No survey is perfect, but the ABA tries hard to ensure that its survey has statistical significance, and every year this is one of the best sources of information on how attorneys use technology. Note that the survey was conducted...
September 5, 2015
Every year, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center conducts a survey to gauge the use of legal technology by attorneys in the United States. This year's report was released this past Friday, and as always, I was particularly interested in Volume VI, titled Mobile Lawyers. No survey is perfect, but the ABA tries hard to ensure that its survey has statistical significance, and every year this is one of the best sources of information on how attorneys use technology. Note that the survey was conducted...
