the Zealous

This is the prophecy of Udo Gollub, as a result of his trip last year to the Singularity University Summit. (The singularity is the point at which computers design and manufacture the next generation of computers, leaving humans out of the loop. Supposedly this is a good thing. Some say this will happen in 2029; some say earlier; some say never.)


Buried in Udo's list of fascinating near-term predictions is the following observation:

In the US, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans.

His advice?

Last week, the ABA presented a panel discussion, When Good Lawyers Make Bad Decisions, moderated by Serina Vash, now executive director at NYU Law and a former prosecutor in the US Attorney's Office in New Jersey.

The panelists consisted of an acting FBI agent and three formerly-licensed lawyers, all of whom pled guilty to felonies. Each of these ex-lawyers had not only impeccable pedigrees (Princeton, Columbia, Univ. VA/London School of Economics), but were highly successful in their respective law practices, at least, up until the time the troubles for each of them began.

And their troubles began, tragically, as the consequence of enormous pressures in their personal lives; in one case, a lawyer was dealing with an alcoholic wife who eventually died as a result of her addiction.

In a study published in the Journal of Corporation Law, law school Professors Badawi and Webber examined, over a five-year period, takeover target share price changes in reaction to the perceived quality of the law firm(s) filing litigation challenging, on behalf of institutional shareholders, the fairness of the announced proposed merger or acquisition. The professors grouped the plaintiff firms into "high quality" and "low quality", based on a number of critieria, including value of settlements recovered and whether any of the firms were openly criticized by the Delaware Chancery judges as being, well, worthless leeches, basically.