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SlyFrog posted:Of course. I'm not talking about short answer types of things though, I'm talking about essays, papers, that type of thing. I think we're having trouble with our cultural diffences. We think of essays as "come back to me with no more than 3,000 words worth of research on what people think about the ABCDEFG Act" where as we also have things that are like "come back to me with no more than 3,000 words on whether Bob Mark and Paul in this (factual scenario) raped Jenny" Both are 3,000 words long, but one of them have a definitive answer and if you can get that answer in 1,500 words thats fine. Wheres as if they want 3,000 drat words on the ABCDEFG Act then you better give it to 'em. Unless of course we're on the same page and I got confused then yay.  
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Nov 20, 2013 07:27
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RFX posted:Sounds like you got lucky with a good professor! If only there were more out there. Don't diverge much from precedent, there is too much scope for loving up as a first year associate. I despise contract drafting and am lazy with it though so your mileage may vary. I also do not envy you this because every American contract I have looked at is loving horrible to read and it's like plain English is some kind of alien idea, although that could just be true about the one or two jurisdictions I've seen stuff from.
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Nov 20, 2013 09:11
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RFX posted:I have my first "draft a new agreement" project as a first year associate. I had a contract drafting professor who stressed the importance of plain language and shorter contracts (along with the end of the billable hour, etc.) but I'm pretty sure I'd be safer turning in some 10+ page thing similar to the one or two I can find on our system.
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Nov 20, 2013 09:16
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SlyFrog posted:Of course it's quite possible that it just so happens that everyone who wrote 3-4 pages was terrible. I personally doubt it, but it is possible. Also lol at a 5-page paper. I remember putting those off until the night before they were due and then stressing about the entire evening I was going to have to give up to do research/drafting. Perspective, now I have it. 
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Nov 20, 2013 13:23
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Green Crayons posted:As a baseline, undergrads are 90% into getting the paper done and 10% into getting the paper done well. On top of that, it's really hard to to write well while writing concisely. I'm would imagine that the answer to your scenario is that, overall, the 3-4 pages were of a lower quality. I think this might have been the case at a lot of places, but was unlikely to have been the reason where I was. I'm pretty comfortable they were not three pages because, "gently caress it, I did not get to this and am just going to throw some poo poo together at the last minute and three is easier than five." I also disagree that it is hard to write well while writing concisely. I think it is hard to write well. I think long winded writing is poor writing. Trying to make it more concise does not usually make it worse(as it takes additional effort beyond simply puking raw thoughts on a page). Before I get all Goon-intelligence-dick-measuring attacked here, I will be the first to admit that I (more than most) am not concise. I am unable to practice what I preach in this area, so I am certainly not making claims of superiority in actual practice. Green Crayons posted:Also lol at a 5-page paper. I remember putting those off until the night before they were due and then stressing about the entire evening I was going to have to give up to do research/drafting. Perspective, now I have it. I still do this with work to this day. But of course, as I may have mentioned before, I hate my job. Except for the "putting off" part. Instead, now I just stress the three-four days before something is due and get roughly 2-3 hours of broken, fitful sleep per night. SlyFrog fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Nov 20, 2013 |
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Nov 20, 2013 16:29
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feel good barrister --> barista story http://www.onyamagazine.com/lifestyle/australian-entrepreneurs-taking-over-new-york/
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Nov 20, 2013 18:50
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SlyFrog posted:I also disagree that it is hard to write well while writing concisely. I think it is hard to write well. I think long winded writing is poor writing. Trying to make it more concise does not usually make it worse(as it takes additional effort beyond simply puking raw thoughts on a page). As such, I find it hard to write well and hard to write concisely.  Even during the editing process, when simply condensing what is already written, it's a difficult process because you're trying to get the correct "nugget" of whatever idea you were trying to get across, but still make the overall prose make logical sense and flow.
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Nov 20, 2013 22:14
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Lawdog69 posted:feel good barrister --> barista story All I got from this is that there is some sort of artisan ice cream that I need to find and eat.
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Nov 20, 2013 22:17
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Green Crayons posted:While I don't envision "writing well" and "writing concisely" as mutually exclusive aspects of composition, I certainly don't see them as essentially the same thing. For legal purposes conciseness is good writing: anytime you're saying in ten words what you could say as well in five you're writing badly. You are not an author painting a picture with words where the more metaphors and description of the scenery the better.
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Nov 20, 2013 22:48
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I agree and disagree. I have read concise legal writing that is still bad, despite being concise. I understand the benefits of (and strive for) brevity, but it does not automatically make a piece of legal writing good. It simply puts the writing on the road to being better than what it was. But you can still end up with bad legal writing, which is the opinion I was trying to voice.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:23
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all legal writing is poo poo and, like all writing, it will always be overwhelmingly poo poo.
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Nov 20, 2013 23:41
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legal writing is poo poo and will always be poo poo
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Nov 20, 2013 23:58
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Adar posted:legal writing is poo poo and will always be poo poo
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Nov 20, 2013 23:59
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There was this other clerk that used the word "pettifoggery" in a bench memo what the gently caress
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Nov 21, 2013 00:02
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That's a great one. One time I wrote in a brief that opposing counsel's argument was "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" but then I remembered the first part of that quote and thought better of putting it in the brief. I'm saving it for when it will be truly appreciated.
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Nov 21, 2013 00:06
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most of the words I write in a given day could be characterized as a tale told by an idiot
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Nov 21, 2013 00:08
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http://scifi2scifab.media.mit.edu/2013/11/20/lawyer-exploring-the-future-of-legal-work-with-machine-learning-and-comics/an MIT researcher posted:“2H2K: LawyeR” is an in-progress project exploring the the future of electronic document discovery and machine learning on the practice of the legal profession. I’m pursuing that topic by prototyping an interactive machine learning interface for document discovery and writing and illustrating a comic telling the story of a sysadmin in a 2050 law firm. This work is a part of a collaborative project I’m pursuing with John Powers, 2H2K, which imagines life in the second half of the 21st century. 
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Nov 21, 2013 02:22
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quote:What happens when a large portion of the white collar jobs in large corporate legal firms are eliminated through automation? What does a law firm look like in that world? What does the law look like?
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Nov 21, 2013 02:52
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My school has a 40-hour pro bono requirement with some unfortunate restrictions on what counts toward it. The pro bono I did over the summer doesn't count, nor does my work in a pro bono clinic. I'm fine on the NY State 50-hour requirement, since my work in a clinic counts towards that. But the 40-hour school requirement is killing me, and I've got to have it done by April 1. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to knock out the school requirement? Any goon lawyers in here working on a pro bono matter need free help from a 3L?
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Nov 21, 2013 03:06
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NY Legal Aid runs 6-8 hour clinics every so often in Harlem/South Bronx/Queens where they supervise people not yet admitted, you may want to check with them if you can get in touch.
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Nov 21, 2013 04:32
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Colorblind Pilot posted:Does anyone have any suggestions on how to knock out the school requirement? Any goon lawyers in here working on a pro bono matter need free help from a 3L? Can you get my loans discharged?
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Nov 21, 2013 06:11
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Mattavist posted:Can you get my loans discharged? I think it probably depends on whether assisted suicide is legal in your jurisdiction.
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Nov 21, 2013 06:52
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Petey posted:http://scifi2scifab.media.mit.edu/2013/11/20/lawyer-exploring-the-future-of-legal-work-with-machine-learning-and-comics/
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Nov 21, 2013 22:27
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Petey posted:http://scifi2scifab.media.mit.edu/2013/11/20/lawyer-exploring-the-future-of-legal-work-with-machine-learning-and-comics/ Total bullshit, fwiw, at least w/r/t "secrecy", insofar as there's a shitton of public work about sentiment analysis and semantic document classification etc. A lot of it's being patented, at least, and that poo poo's my bread and butter these days.
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Nov 21, 2013 23:35
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Elotana posted:There are a ton of products that try to do this and all of them suck. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the dumbest contract attorney will be smarter than the best algorithm for at least another decade. You're not thinking about it properly. The value of these systems isn't in their greater accuracy than a team of contract attorneys, it's in how much cheaper they are. If you can get court approval to never have a human look at 75% of the documents you don't produce you've just saved shitloads of money.
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Nov 22, 2013 00:41
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evilweasel posted:You're not thinking about it properly. The value of these systems isn't in their greater accuracy than a team of contract attorneys, it's in how much cheaper they are. If you can get court approval to never have a human look at 75% of the documents you don't produce you've just saved shitloads of money.
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Nov 22, 2013 00:43
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evilweasel posted:You're not thinking about it properly. The value of these systems isn't in their greater accuracy than a team of contract attorneys, it's in how much cheaper they are. If you can get court approval to never have a human look at 75% of the documents you don't produce you've just saved shitloads of money. I am not a lawyer but I have been working in electronic discovery for over 6 years now. I would be happy to answer any questions about predictive coding, other tools out there, or the industry in general. Right now I am working on cases that interface with federal financial/trade regulators (SEC, FINRA, FRB, etc). Typically law firms shelve the idea of predictive coding (i.e. machine learning) when they realize they need to dedicate their most well informed associates to sit down for 2 days to review and tag a few thousand documents.
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Nov 22, 2013 02:41
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gvibes posted:Are courts still finding privilege waivers where you don't have attorneys review for privilege? You still have a human look at relevant documents, just not the ones the computer declares are irrelevant. Those just don't get produced.
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Nov 22, 2013 05:36
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The project is mostly a provocation - the class is from science fiction to science fabrication - but it's in the direction of a trend that the legal profession has been going for two or three decades now. Chaucer posted:I am not a lawyer but I have been working in electronic discovery for over 6 years now. I would be happy to answer any questions about predictive coding, other tools out there, or the industry in general. Right now I am working on cases that interface with federal financial/trade regulators (SEC, FINRA, FRB, etc). Typically law firms shelve the idea of predictive coding (i.e. machine learning) when they realize they need to dedicate their most well informed associates to sit down for 2 days to review and tag a few thousand documents. Really? I get that 2 days is a nontrivial investment of time and effort by expensive lawyers, but still, the payoff could be enormous. If it's really only two days it would seem like a no brainer to have them do it. Would love to hear anything you have to say. I've done a little bit of loving around with NLTK and entity recognition and it's very interesting. e: the other analogous thing would be DocumentCloud, which is now mostly used by data journalists, but was built specifically for the purpose of uploading massive numbers of documents, OCRing them, recognizing entities, and visualizing connections between them across documents.
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Nov 22, 2013 05:59
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Petey posted:
Well it's a few reasons. The results are much better when all training documents are tagged by one person super knowledgeable about the case. Getting that person to sit down for 1-3k documents is not always easy. Industry marketing has been good at making people think you just press a button and bingo your documents are tagged perfectly across sixteen different categories. In reality, you should use it for very simple yes/no type decisions like Resp/Nonresp or Priv/Notpriv. Bring a 2 million search-term responsive document population down to 250,000. Then run normal review from there. There's still a lot of work in doing it right, especially when it's something most people haven't done before. You can't apply old training to new documents you add to the database. It's less effective when the case specifics are complex or more subtle. You have to sit down and figure out the F-measure and what the judge and the opposing side will accept. You list this out to counsel at the start of a new project and hiring a bunch of contract attorneys starts to sound safer and easier.
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Nov 22, 2013 07:27
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At my firm the attorneys handle most document review because our cases don't usually involve millions of emails (just thousands). We've experimented with predictive coding on some larger cases. The problem is early on, the only one likely to be knowledgeable enough about the subject matter is the partner or non-equity handling the matter, and they rarely have the time or computer skills. An associate new to the case would basically have to do a doc review to become familiar with the background, then do another review for the predictive coding. By that point the associate could have reviewed most of everything manually. Then again, we're a midsize boutique and I think we staff our cases much leaner than larger firms.
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Nov 22, 2013 13:23
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the milk machine posted:At my firm the attorneys handle most document review because our cases don't usually involve millions of emails (just thousands). It has nothing to do with lean staffing and everything to do with thousands of emails vs millions.
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Nov 22, 2013 14:01
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Well I exaggerate a little... but yeah, our largest reviews don't approach what the large firms deal with even though they may take several hundred hours to complete.
the milk machine fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Nov 22, 2013 |
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Nov 22, 2013 14:47
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http://theweek.com/article/index/251957/which-professions-have-the-most-psychopaths Thought of you Soothing Vapors.
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Nov 22, 2013 17:23
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mikeraskol posted:http://theweek.com/article/index/251957/which-professions-have-the-most-psychopaths  the funniest part of that is that doctors show up on the "no psycho" list, every doctor ive ever known or represented has been one tiny push away from being a serial killer edit: just saw surgeon and doctor are listed separately. ok, I buy that
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Nov 22, 2013 18:34
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Soothing Vapors posted:stop, I'm blushing Yeah, surgeons are completely nuts. Doctors usually have some crazy in them, but it's nothing compared to surgeons.
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Nov 22, 2013 18:42
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mikeraskol posted:http://theweek.com/article/index/251957/which-professions-have-the-most-psychopaths
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Nov 22, 2013 18:52
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The Warszawa posted:NY Legal Aid runs 6-8 hour clinics every so often in Harlem/South Bronx/Queens where they supervise people not yet admitted, you may want to check with them if you can get in touch. Thanks Warsz, I'll look into it.
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Nov 22, 2013 19:26
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TenementFunster posted:don't see "solider" on there, so yep, that's bullshit Surprisingly most people in the military aren't reprehensible human beings. There are some pieces of poo poo out there, but it's mostly just a bunch of kids sucked in with stories.
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Nov 22, 2013 22:53
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Mr. Nice! posted:Surprisingly most people in the military aren't reprehensible human beings. There are some pieces of poo poo out there, but it's mostly just a bunch of kids sucked in with stories. Sociopaths probably don't get PTSD, either.
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Nov 22, 2013 23:21
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