Watson

Are we experiencing, or about to experience, a revolution in the world of legal services? Slow your roll....

* IBM says Watson’s about to take away your job, which is an announcement IBM makes roughly every three months because they’re taunting us. [Corporate Counsel]

* Betty Shelby acquitted in the killing of a black motorist because apparently it’s always reasonable to believe a random black guy is going to pull a gun. [NBC News]

* Former client seeks $1.4 million back that it spent trying to disqualify BakerHostetler. [Law360]

* Latham’s Alice Fisher has pulled out of the FBI Director sweepstakes. All eyes are on Joe Lieberman right now, but folks G. Gordon Liddy is just sitting there raring to go. [National Law Journal]

* And apparently Sheriff Clarke (who I’m sure was Trump’s personal pick) is taking a Homeland Security job so he can focus on harassing the poor and disadvantaged without having to bother all those nice bankers. [New York Times]

* Judge Charles Breyer took a break from writing the best benchslaps of all time to issue a groundbreaking video game ruling citing Star Wars and Love Actually — two movies that should never, ever be mentioned in the same sentence. [Hollywood Reporter]

* Stupid fan lawsuit against Warriors center ZaZa Pachulia moves on. [KENS5]

* More horrific allegations from Ken Starr’s world-class leadership at Baylor. [Huffington Post]

Technology is changing the legal profession, and lawyers must think about how this can increase their productivity.

Here are four tasks that robots will have to learn how to perform before they can replace human lawyers.

This robot is going to destroy our industry.

What is ROSS Intelligence? Think of ROSS as your super-duper researcher. ROSS will always find the most relevant case law and legislation.

When it comes to legal technology, there's a whole lot of innovation going on.

Law firms and lawyers must embrace innovation, including new technology -- or suffer the consequences.

Practitioners are anxious and waiting to see if this new technology will result in cutting out lawyers and putting them out of business.

When it comes to quality control, Cravath remains the gold standard.

* Voters in Scotland just said no to independence from the United Kingdom (although it might not have been a big deal for the legal profession if the vote had gone the other way). [New York Times]

* Congratulations to Drexel Law on a whopping $50 million gift — and its new name, the Thomas R. Kline School of Law. [Philadelphia Inquirer via WSJ Law Blog]

* The latest chapter in the “cautionary tale” of David Lola: dismissal of the contract attorney’s lawsuit against Skadden and Tower Legal. [American Lawyer]

* An office renovation for Baker Botts in Houston strips junior associates of window offices. [ABA Journal]

* How could Watson transform the practice of patent law? [Corporate Counsel]

* Are we seeing a reversal in the trend of declining prison populations? [Washington Post]

* The chorus of voices calling for Judge Mark Fuller to resign in the wake of domestic violence charges against him continues to grow. [New York Times]

This is a terrible time to go to law school, unless you are an android.

From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out. People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t. — Bill Herr, a lawyer who used to supervise document review for a chemical company, discussing new e-discovery […]

Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Size Matters, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers. We all know that it is only a matter of time before we are replaced by computers. As Elie explained a few weeks ago, the legal community is already predicting how computers can do the […]

From “concept searching” to “cloud computing,” every year there are new buzz words and catch phrases that enter into the lexicon of legal technology. Of course, when you are dealing with technology of any sort, you should expect to update jargon regularly (such as from 3G to 4G to 5G, whatever that means). 2011 is […]

I should have written about this days ago, but the pain was still too near to me. The humans have lost to the machines. We might as well start digging towards the Earth’s core, where it’s still warm, and start building our own Zion. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the terrifying […]