Is Your Law Firm Creative Enough? If Yes, Guess Again
We don’t usually think of the law as the place our most creative people go. Lawyers with a creative bent often drift into business, where a higher risk tolerance is often required to make a success of yourself. Some of our greatest writers…
A Manual for How to Blow Your Due Diligence
Step one: don’t have a manual. That’s the message in an information-packed new book about the inner workings of the SEC just after the Madoff and now largely forgotten (but just as egregious) Allen Stanford frauds.
In his memoir of five…
Due Diligence When Databases Fail
What to do when the databases you rely on start stripping out the very data you are paying for?
Word in today’s Wall Street Journal that the main credit reporting firms will be removing many civil judgments and tax liens from credit reports…
The Best Picture Mix-Up and Artificial Intelligence
What will it take for artificial intelligence to surpass us humans? After the Oscars fiasco last night, it doesn't look like much.
As a person who thinks a lot about the power of human thought versus that of machines, what is striking is…
The Fake News Problem in Corporate America
There is a huge branch of the “fake news” business that gets no attention at all: the fake news consumed each day by corporate America that has nothing to do with politics, but everything to do with business – the bulk of the $18 trillion…
FEAR OF FLYING, FEAR OF DUE DILIGENCE
A wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal here called “The Logic of Our Fear of Flying” does a great job explaining our irrational fear of flying using concepts from math. We all know that our chances of dying in a plane crash are much…
Surprise! Google is There to Make Money
A story in the Wall Street Journal Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products serves as a useful reminder for something we tell clients all the time: Google is there to make money, and if your ideal search result won’t make them money,…
How to Tell Fake News from Real
Every day now, we hear about the woes of readers unable to distinguish between “fake news” and real news, as if undependable news reporting is anything new. Readers and fact investigators have always needed to know how to figure out for…
Lessons from the Kardashian Stickup
This blog may be one of the few publications in the Western world that has never written the word “Kardashian,” but that has now changed. In the stories about the robbery in Paris of Kim Kardashian we found numerous issues that touch on…
The Yelp Defense: Internet Garbage Isn’t Our Problem
When your defense is that the law allows you to publish garbage without fear of prosecution, one takeaway is simple: the internet is filled with garbage that needs to be well verified before you rely on it.
This blog thinks the Ninth Circuit…
