Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes that stated that a lawyer’s basic responsibility was to predict the outcome of potential litigation? Even in the transactional legal context, a client presumably wants to know what a court would actually rule if a particular dispute were to arise. It now seems that the predictive litigation software being touted as the wave of the future may make these “predictions” into a highly analytical, data-driven (and nearly uniform?) product. Is much of the work lawyers threatened by this? To the extent that it isn’t, are some attorneys going to be transformed into clerks or data analysts?
Monthly Archives: November 2013
UK Publishers Going Bust at Fast Pace
Print isn’t dead. It just lives on in used bookstores aided by internet sales through Amazon. As a result, publishers, who would rather customers purchase new copies (i.e. higher-priced versions) of, well, old books from the publisher rather than from among the used books easily searched on Amazon, are going out of business. Of course, publishers of periodicals have been hard hit too as the above article points out.
Everything is expected to be available for free on the internet these days, and, if you want print, you go to Amazon or Alibris.
Print Still Lives! (in the Mind, Anyways)
Jason Wilson covers a piece in Scientific American on the reasons why the brain prefers information presented on paper. One can see the marketing possibilities here. Buy Print: For a New Scientific Humanity.
