The business of betting on other peoples’ lawsuits is heating up. I had lunch recently with 30 Under 30 honoree Jay Greenberg and his partner Max Volsky of LexShares, a legal-funding platform they launched last November. Their target for the first year was to average $100,000 in funding per month through the electronic marketplace that matches up investors with lawyers and plaintiffs who need money to pursue their cases.
They’re already beating that goal. Since November, Greenberg told me, LexShares...
Many people associate speech recognition technology with its consumer use cases, such as talking to phones, TVs, cars, and even home appliances. However, speech recognition also helps organizations and professionals—legal professionals in particular—increase productivity by simplifying documentation and paperwork. In fact, the average person can talk up to 3-5 times faster than they can type. It’s also more accurate and improves the overall quality of reporting. Speech recognition technology...
First came the outsourcing of legal work once done by U.S. lawyers to cheaper foreign counterparts.
Now, it appears, would-be BigLaw associates may also have to compete with artificial intelligence applications in the foreseeable future.
Megafirm Dentons and some major U.S. law firms have agreed to train Ross, a so-called artificially intelligent attorney developed by students at the University of Toronto, in U.S. bankruptcy law, reports the Globe and Mail.
Using IBM’s Watson computer,...
No place in Texas produces more oil than Karnes County, but suddenly the roaring economy here is cooling fast, chilled by the plunging price of crude.
Workers who migrated from far and wide to find work here, chasing newfound oil riches, are being laid off, deserting their recreational vehicle parks and going home. Hay farmers who became instant millionaires on royalty checks for their land have suddenly fallen behind on payments for new tractors they bought when cash was flowing. Scores of mobile...
We thank Adam for the opportunity to post here about our recently published coursebook, Law and Neuroscience. The book is published by Aspen and co-authored by Owen Jones (Vanderbilt), Jeffrey Schall (Vanderbilt), and Francis Shen (Univ. of Minnesota). The book has four main purposes:
to introduce readers to how brain science is (and is not) already being used in a number of legal contexts;
to provide a user-friendly foundation for understanding how the human brain works, and how new techniques...
NextLaw Labs signs ROSS Intelligence, a startup developing a legal advisor app powered by IBM Watson.
Making good on its plan to develop, deploy and invest in new technologies, Am Law 100 firm Dentons’ innovation arm—NextLaw Labs—has partnered with IBM to develop a program that will allow startups to create and deploy legal applications more quickly.
Over the next few years, the increasing use of technology to collaborate with clients and create a more transparent working relationship...
With an array of statistical software products on the market (e.g., Stata, SPSS, SAS, R, etc.), I limit my use of Excel to data management tasks. That said, I know that others exploit Excel's full capacity and use it for some limited analytical and statistical tasks. To this end, I pass along information on a recent release of an add-in, RegressIt, which is designed to enrich (and ease) Excel's regression capabilities. Developed by a pair of B-School professors, Robert Nau (Duke) and John Butler...
From these studies, it seems that there is no one best way to convey bad news, but these 5 principles should provide some guidance:
Tell at least part of the truth if you think the person needs to hear it. Whether it’s a bad health prognosis or the need to let an employee you’re firing know how to avoid getting canned in the future, there are situations when you can provide help to the person receiving the negative message.
Sugar coat it if you think the person can’t handle it (“it’s...