<waves hands in general direction of everything>

I’m still here. Time is really weird now, isn’t it? Some days last a really long time but weeks go by fast. It seems like a long time since I posted.

Things are fine here, for the most part. Healthy, employed, it’s starting to get warmer. (Chicago/Northern Indiana winters last about 7.5 months but we make up for it with street festivals and parades and outdoor dining the rest of the time.) If you’ve never met me, I wear my hair very short, but I haven’t had a haircut since early March. I’m starting to look like Pete Rose circa 1983.

I mean, I guess not 100% fine.

Christmas for “Law as Data” Nerds

So, much to my surprise and delight, Public.Resource.org won their SCOTUS case against the State of Georgia. The case hinged on whether or not annotations to the state code were copyrightable and I while I hoped Public.Resource would prevail, the whole thing made me make that Marge Simpson worried “mmmmm” sound.

AND THEN yesterday, Thomson Reuters sued ROSS over possible theft of proprietary data. (Bob Ambrogi story) (ROSS’s response.) From what I gather, there’s some issues of fact at dispute before we even get to the “what is proprietary when it comes to data?” conversation, so I guess I’ll just watch and wait.

This, But For LegalTech

I saw this on twitter and really wanted to make one for Legal Tech.

It’s based on the Gartner Hype Cycle, in case you didn’t know.

Cool People Doing Cool Things

This has me excited. The GovTech/Civic Tech/Legal Tech worlds have A LOT of overlap and if we can get procurement sorted and get better sharing of tools, things will be a lot better. Because it’s stupid the way we do it now and sooooo much of it is terrible.

Vocational Awe

The concept of vocational awe is fascinating and I highly suggest you look into it, especially if you are in the more “touchy feely” areas of law. I used really tie my identity and my self-worth to my job and…I am a lot happier now that I don’t. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care about it or want to do well, I’m just not…going to work myself to death for it.

Also, this:

WHAT

I really do love Chicago

In National News..

So I guess this is where we’re at pandemic-wise, huh?

I dunno…I am neither an epidemiologist or a economist so I’m not 100% of what should be done and when and how. I also don’t know why our two options are “kill grandma” or “small business owner kills himself.” Because there are other options. But I’ll let you look into that on your own.

I will just say that probably the most…disturbing?…thing about the past few weeks is how cavalierly people talk about death. Have they never had anyone they cared about or close to them die? I wonder if I would have felt the same before my mom’s death. But for those of you that haven’t had a close death, trust me when I say ‘IT CHANGES EVERYTHING’ and I don’t feel like anyone has fully grasped or talked about the psychic damage that’s going to be done millions of people dealing with close personal brush with death on top of everything else that’s about to happen. Also, this:

Okay, I think that’s all I got. Oh! Dad and I went up the beach and caught the sunset on Sunday. It was nice.

As you can see, we were not the only ones with that idea.

Be well.