Category Archives: Fact and Law

Changes in the Legal Market

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Jotting down some rough thoughts on how new tech + more lawyers affects different parts of the legal market (apologies for typos):

Big Law

Large firms catering to large corporations, or more accurately, well-known partners catering to large corporations. Presumably, number of large corporations isn’t increasing relative to number of lawyers. Also, number of big law firms and well-known partners increase slowly because of the big law feedback loop — i.e. the only way you get to be a big firm is if you win big cases, and the only way you get big cases is by already being a big firm.

So for big law, your underlying demand (corporations) remains untouched. And your underlying supply (firms) is the same. But that doesn’t mean no change. More law students = more competitive to get a big law job. Effect of new technology — productivity per lawyer increases, and since caseload is fixed, lawyers per firm drops. You could argue that firms might hire more lawyers and ask them to do less work for less salary. But that’s unlikely — there are fixed costs per lawyer — HR, office space, etc. So firms are likely to hire fewer lawyers, but require higher productivity (ugh). And you’ll see the price tag for big law drop, although this will be the result of fewer hours billed rather than a lower hourly billing rate (assuming we don’t nix the hourly system altogether).

Solo Practitioner

Difference story for people hanging out a shingle. Supply is more closely linked to number of lawyers rather than number of firms, so legal costs should go down more dramatically. But this also depends on the nature of the legal services offered.

If you’re offering services with minimal court or client interaction — e.g. helping a small business owner incorporate, filing basic wills, drafting run-of-the-mill employment contract, etc. — technology works to your advantage. These things scale well. You have to charge a lower price per client, but you can also cater to more clients, so it’s a net wash. And if you’re sufficiently entrepreneurial, you can also seek out “underserved” clients, thereby expanding the market. For example, I normally wouldn’t pay a lawyer to review the purchase agreement for a new car. But suppose I could use my smartphone to snap a photo of the agreement and e-mail it to a lawyer. Normally, it’d take the lawyer an hour to review the entire contract, but by using pattern-recognition software to highlight unusual terms, she can send back her analysis of the contract in 15 minutes at a total cost of $100. I don’t know about you, but if it’s a $10K+ car, that seems reasonable.

On the other hand, if you’re dealing with legal services that require more interaction with people — e.g. child custody fights, criminal defense, landlord/tenant, etc. — then life is rough. New tech may help you do legal research or fill out forms faster, but it doesn’t do much to speed up interviewing a client or appearing in court. And you still have more competition, so you can’t charge as much as you used to.

Ethics

Some of this stuff poses an ethics problem as well. In order to compensate for the lower income-per-client, a lot of lawyers are going to take on more cases. To some extent, it’s great that more clients are able to get legal services at lower cost. But a lot of these lawyers are also going to take on more cases than they handle. And when it comes to stuff like child custody or criminal defense, that’ll get ugly. If it’s one thing that law school should teach, it’s time and case management.

No Acronym Must Be Left Alive

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In light of legislative acronyms like USA PATRIOT, PROTECT IP, E-PARASITE, and STOCK, I propose the The No Acronym Must Be Left Alive Act:

Sec. 1 – The Comptroller General of the United States shall have the power to declare that any piece of proposed legislation is silly.
Sec. 2 – For the purposes of sec. 1, legislation is silly if a substantial factor in how it was named was creating a contrived acronym.
Sec. 3 – The Comptroller General shall provide adequate notice that a piece proposed legislation has been declared silly, preferably by posting a yellow sticky note on his office door.
Sec. 4 – Once legislation has been declared silly, the sponsors of said legislation shall deposit $100 into a jar outside the Comptroller General’s office. The proceeds of this jar shall go towards reducing the national debt.
Sec. 5 – If the sponsor of silly legislation fails to comply with Sec. 4 in a timely manner, any member of the public shall have the legal right to deposit one (1) dead fish on the sponsor’s office desk.

SOPA and PROTECT IP chill free speech

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There’s a lot of outcry over how pending copyright legislation (SOPA (PDF), formerly known as E-PARASITE, in the House, and PROTECT IP (PDF) in the Senate) would “break the Internet”. Hyperbole aside, the bills would enable the Attorney General and rights holders to go after payment processors, domain name registrars, and the like to disable access to “foreign” websites that infringe U.S. intellectual property rights.

My concern is that the bills are overbroad. They take down too much non-infringing speech in order to get at the stuff that does infringe upon copyright. I’m not sure whether the Supreme Court would hold that the bills abridge free speech rights under the First Amendment, but they would have a serious chilling effect upon free speech.

For example, suppose that the Russian equivalent of Google’s Blogger service hosts infringing content — say, at blogger.ru/piratedmovies. Suppose also that this is the only piece of infringing content and that the vast majority of content on blogger.ru is stuff like critiques of Dostoyevsky and recipes for borscht. Under Sec. 102 of SOPA, the Attorney General can obtain a court order to block off all U.S. access to blogger.ru. While the Russian operators of blogger.ru could, in theory, appear in a U.S. court to dispute the Attorney General’s actions, it’s unlikely that the operators of a Russian language website are going to go to that effort for the handful of American users interested in its Borscht recipes. Collectively though, this would block off Americans from a lot of “foreign” Internet account. It would, in effect, create a “Great Firewall of America”.

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Get rid of credit card numbers

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Short Version

Credit card companies should switch to a PayPal-like system for online payments, and use “blank” cards (no number visible to the human eye) for offline payments.

Long Version

As Sony restores service to its network after the possible theft of millions of credit card numbers, I wish people would start asking one simple question: Why do we need credit cards numbers?

By this, I don’t mean, why do we need lines of credit? That’s a question for the economists. I’m simply asking why we need some 16-digit number (plus an expiration date and 3-digit “security code”) that people can use to magically make you owe money. It’s an inherently insecure system.

I tried to split a bill once by asking my friends to let me swipe their cards using Square. For those who don’t know, Square is a little credit card reader that you can use with most modern smartphones. My friends were nervous about the security implications of me initiating a transaction with their credit cards on my phone. My response: If I really wanted to steal their credit card info, I would just memorize the number while it’s sitting on the table in front of me. Second response: Everyone seems quite OK with handing their card over to the underpaid high school student waiter.

The problem is that a credit card number is supposed to be a “secret”, but it’s one we frequently share with all sorts of random strangers. So what’s the alternative? Use a different “number” for every transaction, like PayPal does.
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The Great Dissent

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One of my favorite semi-fictional exchanges of all time, found in Judge Kozinski’s dissent in U.S. v. Ramirez Lopez, 315 F.3d 1143 (2003):

Ramirez-Lopez: Isn’t the jury supposed to have all the facts?

Lawyer: Not all the facts. Some facts are cumulative, others are hearsay. Some facts are both cumulative and hearsay.

Ramirez-Lopez: Can you say that in plain English?

Lawyer: No.

Re. Shirley Sherrod

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<rant>Let me get this straight.

USDA official Shirley Sherrod basically says, “Because this farmer was white, I didn’t do all I could to help him. But then I realized that was racist, and that all racism is bad, so I helped him save his farm.”

White farmer says, “Yup, she saved our farm. She rocks.”

Andrew Breitbart edits that down to just this: “Because this farmer was white, I didn’t do all I could to help him.” He calls her a racist. White House (or Tom Vilsack) fires her.

WTF?!?!

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California – Yes on Prop 14, No on Prop 16

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As most people who read my stuff have probably already voted, I should have posted this earlier if I wanted to actually persuade anyone. Still, I feel it’s good practice for me to justify my own votes.

Yes on Prop 14

Prop 14 creates a non-partisan primary system. Rather than party-specific primaries, there’s just one big election where everyone from any party runs. The top two vote-getters (assuming neither candidate gets more than 50%) then move on to a run-off vote.

Personally, I think instant-runoff voting is the way to go, but a jungle primary would be an improvement too. That said, you’re not automatically getting less polarizing candidates as advertised. In most jungle primaries, the two who make it to the runoff round are probably going to be the same two who would have won the Democratic and Republican primaries anyway. The benefit is really in those edge cases where there’s a candidate with significant cross-over appeal. For example, let’s say I’m really invested in the outcome of a close Democratic primary for Governor but I also really like one of the more moderate Republican candidate for Treasurer. Under the old system, they’re on different ballots, so I’d have to choose which one I care about more. Under the new one, it’s all unified onto a single ballot, so I can make those moderating votes for both candidates. Continue reading →

Buy Tort Bunnies Schwag

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There are now not one but two places where you can buy Tort Bunnies stuff.

T-Shirt: I shock your conscience. I shock it hard.

Zazzle has been around for a while. Selection is pretty good and given that I wanted to make posters and not deal with CafePress’s premium shop nonsense, that didn’t leave very many alternatives. The value t-shirt option is very cheap, but apart from that, things get very expensive, very quick IMHO. You’re welcome to pay more if you want though — I am charging a percentage-based royalty after all.

MySoti is a newer print-on-demand site. The prices for their American Apparel branded shirts are cheaper than the same at Zazzle’s. Also, word on the Internet is that their print quality is better than Zazzle’s, but they have a rather long turn-around time. Their FAQ says not to call them until after 28 days. The selection is a bit more limited too, hence, why I currently only have three shirt designs up here.

Anyhow, I’m going to wait for feedback and some sample merchandise before passing further judgment. For now, you’re welcome to try your luck buying from either supplier.

Tort Bunnies is Now Accessible to the Blind

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Tort Bunnies is now accessible to the visually impaired and anyone else using a screen reader, or at very least, a little less annoying to navigate than before. For those not in the know, the blind can use software that reads web-content aloud to navigate the web. Naturally, this breaks down with certain graphical elements, like web-comic images. I’ve had transcripts of all the comics hidden on the site for a while now for search engines to index, but they weren’t all that inviting to people using screen readers. Some issues that I’ve fixed:

  • The transcript used to include things like “—–” to separate panels of the comic. Screen-readers, however, read this as “dash dash dash dash dash,” which I imagine gets really annoying over time. That’s been replaced with the phrase “next panel.”
  • The transcripts were not clearly marked, and in order to get there, a screen reader would have to jump past the image, notes, and all sorts of markup before getting to the transcript. There is a now a hidden link near the beginning of the page that allows screen-readers to jump straight to the transcript.
  • The alt text and title text were mixed up. They’re separated now.

There are still minor things here and there that might annoy people using screen-readers of course. For example, I use the « and » symbols in a few places as “arrows” pointing left and right. Some screen readers will not read them as arrows however, but as “left double angle bracket” and “right double angle bracket.” I know that might be annoying, but I’m fan of how they look and given that they’re frequently used (see, e.g., Gmail), I think the burden here should actually be on the makers of screen-readers to come up a better textual description of that symbol.
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