Irregular Update #5

Hello friends in the computer,

I am taking advantage of the wonders of being a digital nomad and working from my family farm in southern Ohio for the next two weeks.

I’ve been wanting to explore video content options PLUS I have some meetings this week and next, so while the dining room wall of my parents’ house isn’t BAD, I wanted some consistency for when I travel.

Behold:

Why buy an expensive green screen set up when you live in 100+ year old craftsman house with a built in dish rack in the dining room and Walmart sells green fabric for $5/yard?

Speaking of Maker Culture…

So the house I grew up in is a actual honest to god “architecture plans bought from Sears Roebuck” craftsman. (The wood was cut locally by the family that my parents bought it from.) The living room has some nice knock-off Stickley style furniture. I don’t know if my love of Arts & Crafts style decor was informed by that or just a coincidence but it makes living in Chicagoland fun.

As I was laying on the couch listening to the electric hum through the 80 year old wiring and thinking of current events and specifically the move towards AI created creative work, I wondered if we’ll see a similar blow back like we did post-Victorian mechanization. Something to think about. Of course, in law we have quite reached the full potential of mechanization yet soooo…

Oh man, I think we have a theme developing..

I was always going to share this thread from Jordan Furlong on Twitter about the proposed license plan in Georgia…

but really, aren’t standardized tests like the Bar Exam just a industrialization of showing competency? (And….racism.) Maybe there’s something Maker about proving it via work.

Yet Another DoNotPay Update

As someone who has spent the past few years writing up analysis reports and trying to tease out the actual capabilities of legal tech tools from marketing speak PLUS has a strong interest in A2J tech, the whole DoNotPay saga has my mind blown. It now turns out that back in 2017 Techdirt had a story (based on David Colarusso's research) about some allegedly inflated numbers of users helped and chose not to run it.

Between the extremes of "accepting all claims about tech because it's new, exciting, and may help" and "not wanting any change", I have tried to aim for a "open to trying new things with a dose of healthy skepticism that it's actually doing what they say and trying to ensure its done safely (esp in A2J constructs)." Trust, but verify, if you will.

This isn’t the first time a vendor/legal tech provider has “faked it until they make it” about their tool’s capability or usage. (Which I consider lying, btw.) And some tech claims (e.g. AI vs human tagging) are particularly difficult to test because it requires cooperation of the vendor for verification. There’s “we have feature x,y, & z” and then there’s “we do this through a system we are not allowing you to test or view.” What do you do with that? I think, as we’ve seen with politics over the past few years, the existing systems and institutions aren’t capable of managing a serial fabulist and someone otherwise not operating in good faith.

Maybe it’s that I started paying more attention, but I have been under the impression that legal media has relatively recently beefed up their legal tech coverage. I’m hoping that they will have the resources to be able to do more testing of claims, technical or otherwise since I don’t know of many bloggers that have the resources to do this. Don’t get me wrong, I think part time bloggers can be as good as paid journalists, so it’s not a quality or code of ethics thing for me - it’s time/resource limitations. Additionally, I’m hopeful we can make legal tech consumers become more educated about how to ask vendors about their claims. And vendors will see some benefit in proving their claims instead of throwing out unadulterated bullshit. Perhaps there can be a role for academia here? Meanwhile…. wow.

In the meantime, someone look into why some of the larger and more prestigious VC funders apparently do no due diligence.

Data Vis is Not New

I can’t remember where I found it, but check out these data visualizations W.E.B. Du Bois created. Example:

Makes me feel really bad about my basic pie charts.

Help Me Be Creative

As I mentioned, one of the things I want to play around with is video content creation. Maybe tiktoks, maybe cartoons (like Powtoons), maybe something….else? I did a presentation recently to a law school class on contract tech and I think I’d like to try and adapt all or part of it to a video format, but I’m not sure what the best avenue is. Maybe using something like Loom and you see my face? Or just the slides? Is that too boring? Even with my awesome slide design sensibility?

I also massively talk with my hands.

I will leave comments open and if you have any suggestions on how you’d like to consume about 30 minutes of content on contract tech and another 30 on general legal tech principles, please let me know!

I MET FIONA!!!!

Anyone who has followed me on Twitter or Facebook knows I’m a little obsessed with Fiona the Hippo. She was born six weeks premature in late January 2017 at the Cincinnati Zoo. It was pretty touch and go for awhile there and even the NICU nurses from across the street at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (where I spent a lot of time as a kid and thus also the zoo) were drafted to help get IV lines in since it turns out that preemies are kind of the same no matter the species.

Around the time she was born, my mom was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer . She ultimately passed away on Feb 20. (I remember sitting in the hospice room reading updates from the Zoo on Facebook and trying to dissociate.) Fiona pulled through and got stronger and stronger over the course of the next year (during which, in retrospect, I was MASSIVELY messed up). Watching her thrive was a bit of a welcome distraction and somehow gave me some hope about existence.

Well, after 6 years, a pandemic, and many days not conducive to outside hippo time, I finally got to meet her in person.

So if you notice an ever growing collection of hippo stuffies behind me at my Indiana office, that’s what’s up with that.

Be well,

Sarah

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