In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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Comment of the Week: Let’s Talk About the Birds and the… No, NOT THE BEES
By Elie MystalPart of that has been the news cycle: there have been a lot of posts about rape and child porn this week. Predictably, the comments have been filled with largely inappropriate comments about porn and inaccurate comments about rape (seriously commenters, I hope some of you are trolling, otherwise a bunch of you are just date rapists trying to justify ridiculous behavior).
Instead of going with some obvious Todd Akin riff, I’m going with a comment that was largely overlooked, on a story that many of you missed. But I think once I play one of the greatest clips in movie history, you’ll all understand….
Tags: Animal Law, Animals, Bees, Comment of the Day, Comment of the Week, Law Schools, Nicolas Cage, UVA Law, Wicker Man