, ,

The College Admissions Scandal: Another Teachable Moment

The college admissions scandal has been full of wonderful teachable moments – about ethics, humility, greed and corruption. Now for asset hunters there is a new nugget today: overpaying on purpose. As the Boston Globe reported yesterday,…
, , ,

College Admissions Scandal: More Indictments Coming?

Get ready for college admissions scandals phase II, and maybe III, IV and V. The reason I think so? Because of the way it was discovered. Prosecutors didn’t break up the ring of bribing college coaches and exam proctors by using vast computing…
,

Artificial Intelligence: Good and Evil All at Once, Just Like its Creators

Have you ever noticed that artificial intelligence always seems much more frightening when people write about what it will become, but then how it can seem like imperfect, bumbling software when writing about AI in the present tense? You get…
, , ,

Atlanta Paper Exposes Widespread Violation of Federal Law by Private Investigators and the Lawyers That Enable Them

Great work by the Atlanta Journal Constitution on an issue that’s bugged me for years: the brazen violation of federal law by investigators and the lawyers who hire them. At issue is the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, meant to protect the confidentiality…
, ,

Way After Madoff Ponzi Schemes Are Still With Us: How to Avoid Them

Nearly ten years on since the arrest of master Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi fraudsters are still with us. Maybe not with as much money as Madoff’s billions, but powerful enough to do a lot of damage. Being devoted to finding assets,…
, , , , ,

Attorney Ethics 101: Fraud is Not Allowed

The non-legal press doesn’t usually get very deep into questions of legal ethics, but New York Magazine did a reasonable job of it in its hard-hitting piece this week on “The Bad, Good Lawyer” David Boies. The article asks whether Boies…
, ,

AI and Legal Investigation: Seek the Good, Avoid the “Perfect”

Artificial intelligence doesn’t equal artificial perfection. I have argued for a while now both on this blog and in a forthcoming law review article here that lawyers (and the investigators who work for them) have little to fear and much to…
,

Buying AI for Law Firms: Like a Trip to the Auto Show

An entire day at a conference on artificial intelligence and the law last week in Chicago produced this insight about how lawyers are dealing with the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence: Many lawyers are like someone who knows he…
, ,

How to Read Email Headers: Where Did That Email Come From?

Just as it’s nice to know what number someone is using when they call you, wouldn’t it be useful to see where someone was when they sent an email? That information is often contained in the “fine print” of an email known as the “header.” In…
, ,

Artificial Intelligence: In Law, Logic Only Goes So Far

Do you ever wonder why some gifted small children play Mozart, but you never see any child prodigy lawyers who can draft a complicated will? The reason is that the rules of how to play the piano have far fewer permutations and judgment calls…