Naomi Osaka (by si.robi via Wikimedia)
* “How Tough-on-Crime Prosecutors Contribute to Mass Incarceration.” My review of Emily Bazelon’s new book, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration (affiliate link). [New York Times Book Review]
* When it comes to prosecutors, as former prosecutor Joel Cohen explains, it’s all about discretion. [New York Law Journal]
What Even Is AI ‘Competence’? It Depends.
Takeaways from a Legalweek panel on evolving malpractice risks.
* Judge Nancy Gertner (Ret.) defends Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’s exercise of her prosecutorial discretion — and argues that Thomas Turco’s criticisms of Rollins are unfair. [Boston Globe]
* Another ex-prosecutor, Quinn Emanuel partner Alex Spiro, is representing tennis star Naomi Osaka in the “repugnant” lawsuit filed against her by her former coach. [Tennis365]
* Former federal prosecutors, many of them now partners at Biglaw firms, represent more than half of the defense lawyers in Operation Varsity Blues, aka the college admissions scandal. [Big Law Business]
Most Law Firms’ AI Strategies Have a Big Blind Spot. Here’s How One Am Law 200 Firm is Solving It.
Most law firms, big and small, that have adopted AI are making the same mistake: they bought a tool for their lawyers and called it a strategy.
* High-stakes litigation is just one of many factors contributing to Biglaw’s robust profit margin these days — hovering around 40 percent, its highest value in almost 30 years, according to Madhav Srinivasan of Hunton Andrews Kurth. [Law.com]
* Ronald Collins interviews Joan Biskupic about her latest judicial biography, The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts (affiliate link). [SCOTUSblog]
* And speaking of SCOTUS, Will Baude believes that the death penalty “is justifiable and constitutional” — but argues that the Court has not acquitted itself well in its recent handling of capital cases. [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]
David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a journalist, speaker, and novelist. His first book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].