Author: TSA Press

It was not all that long ago that yoga was fringe and marijuana could land you in jail. Now, it seems that everyone’s doing their downward dog before hitting the local dispensary.

In the accelerated dog years of the internet, something similar has happened with AI-powered brief analysis. Introduced just three years ago by a feisty legal research startup, brief analysis quickly became fashionable. Now, with announcements last week of new products from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law, it has officially gone mainstream.

The concept is simple. Think of it as a legal research wizard. Upload a brief or memorandum, and it will tell you what authorities or arguments are missing. Use it as a failsafe to check your own brief before filing or use it to look for holes in your opponent’s brief.

Just in the last 10 days, two major legal research companies have launched brief-analysis tools. On July 12, Thomson Reuters unveiled its Quick Check, a feature that will be available starting July 24 to all subscribers to Westlaw Edge. (See: AI-Driven Brief Analysis Comes to Westlaw, But Does It Differ From Competitors?)

Then last Monday, Bloomberg Law gave a preview of its forthcoming brief analyzer, which it is calling by the eponymous placeholder name Brief Analyzer, and which will be out in beta in September and then for general availability by the end of the year. (See: Now Comes Another Brief Analyzer, this from Bloomberg Law.)

Call it the trickle-up effect, because it has been three years since the first brief analyzer came to market, introduced by the innovative legal research startup Casetext. Launched in 2016, its CARA — short for Case Analysis Research Assistant — uses artificial intelligence to analyze users’ uploaded briefs and memoranda and find relevant cases the document omits.

CARA targeted two use cases. One was to analyze an opponent’s brief to see what authorities and arguments it left out (whether intentionally or not) and thereby jumpstart your reply and find weak spots in its arguments. The other was to serve as a check-and-balance on your own research, either as you are drafting a brief or before filing the final version.

From those initial use cases, CARA evolved into a tool to jumpstart research of any kind. CARA is now integrated within Casetext’s standard research workflow, so that a user can upload a relevant document of any kind and use it to enhance keyword queries and deliver results that are far-better matched to the facts and issues at hand.

One year after CARA launched, the American Association of Law Libraries named it new product of the year. Other legal research companies began paying attention and launched CARA variations of their own. These included Clerk from Judicata, launched in late 2017; EVA from ROSS Intelligence, launched in January 2018 as a standalone product and now integrated into the ROSS platform; and Vincent from vLex, launched in September 2018.

Of these, the most different from CARA is Clerk, which Judicata founder Itai Gurari describes as moneyball for motions. “Just as different batters have different on-base percentages, different motions have different probabilities of being granted or denied,” Gurari wrote in a 2017 blog post.

What makes Clerk unique is that it not only identifies missing cases, but it also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of a brief’s citations and arguments in fairly granular detail, and then suggests ways to improve the arguments and the brief’s overall drafting. Clerk is undeniably cool, but so far works only for California cases.

Vincent from vLex is the only one of these AI-driven brief-analysis tools that has the ability to simultaneously analyze documents in two languages, English and Spanish. And because the vLex legal research platform is international in scope, its results span multiple jurisdictions and can even include a firm’s internal knowledge management resources.

So it can hardly be said that either Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg Law were breaking new ground with their announcements last week of their own brief-analyzer tools. Even so, their entries into the field and their investments of significant resources into developing their tools demonstrate that even the big players see brief analysis as valuable to their customers. And each of these new products brings something unique to the field.

TR’s Quick Check is like CARA in that it enables a lawyer to upload any document that contains at least two citations and obtain a list of other relevant authorities that the document does not cite. It also flags any cases the document does cite that may not be good law. Unlike other brief-analysis products, it delivers only a limited set of results with only the most highly relevant citations. TR says this is to make it more efficient for lawyers to use.

Probably the greatest differentiators for Quick Check are that it is included directly within Westlaw Edge and that its AI technology was developed at TR’s Center for AI & Cognitive Computing, a highly regarded AI research laboratory.

Although Bloomberg Law’s Brief Analyzer is so far only a prototype, it promises unique features as well. For one, it displays its suggested authorities side-by-side with a view of the brief itself, aligning its suggestions with the arguments and sections of the brief. For each suggestion, it provides a concise, plain-English explanation of why the authority is suggested.

No two of these brief analyzers are identical. The best way to get a sense of how they work is to try them for yourself. Even if you are not a subscriber to any of these services, you still have options for testing these tools. Both Casetext and ROSS offer 14-day free trials, and subscribers to the legal research platform Casemaker can get a free one-week trial of Vincent and then half off first-year pricing.

(You can also watch this Legal Robot Battle, in which Casetext presented a comparison of the different brief-analysis tools.)

So get yourself into a comfortable Lotus pose, light up if you care to, and give brief analysis a try.

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

Justice Neil Gorsuch is perhaps best known around these parts as the man who stole Judge Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court, but this term alone he surprised many by siding with his liberal colleagues more often than any other conservative on the high court. In another surprise, Gorsuch — the same man who wanted to let a trucker freeze to death in the name of dismantling Chevron deference — offered some very special law school advice to a first-year student in search of a Supreme autograph.

Patrick Sobkowski, a rising 2L at the University of Dayton School of Law, recently received this touching note from Justice Gorsuch:

Here are the most important parts of Justice Gorsuch’s letter:

My advice to law students is very simple: work hard, learn to write and speak effectively, never give up your passions, treasure your family and friendships, find time to do public service, and learn to win — and lose — graciously.

More than all that, know you will have many regrets in life — things said or done or things left unsaid or undone — but the one thing you will never regret is being kind.

As noted by Sobkowski, this letter is chockful of “[f]antastic advice[,] regardless of whether you are a lawyer or not.” It’ll be a nice keepsake from a Supreme Court justice whose heart we once believed was as cold as ice.

Life advice from US Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch [Quartz]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Kyoto.

Although the data is a little old, that’s the big city with the most Michelin-starred restaurants per capita.

Courchevel (wherever that is).

That’s the small town with the most Michelin-starred restaurants per capita.  (I was just kidding.  Everyone knows that Courchevel is a ski town in France.  Either everyone knows it, or Google is a wonderful thing.)

I was thinking about collecting similar data for law firms.

We all know that Bigg & Mediocre has 100 lawyers who are ranked in their field by Chambers or the Legal 500!  But Bigg & Mediocre has 3,000 lawyers, for heaven’s sake.  If you pick up the phone, call B&M, and ask for a lawyer, you have about a three percent chance of talking to someone who’s any good.

Okay, okay: I admit this is all silly.  First, Chambers and the Legal 500 call folks and ask respondents to identify lawyers who are good in their field.  That’s hardly a perfect system.  (Sometimes, it’s even worse than that.  The raters sometimes ask firms to identify in-house lawyers who can give feedback on the firm’s work.  How many lawyers at firms couldn’t identify at least a couple of in-house lawyers who would say something nice about them?  Name your brother-in-law, for heaven’s sake, or your cousin.)  This process creates a bias in favor of big firms, and it doesn’t necessarily extract information from anyone who’s in a position to judge lawyering skills.  Additionally, reputation is sticky: You might have been a great lawyer 10 years ago; the ratings guide may insist that you’re still good 30 years from now, long after you’ve retired and met your maker.

Second, nobody is silly enough to call Bigg & Mediocre and ask for a lawyer.  That’s a crapshoot if ever there was one.  The local managing partner to whom your call is directed will think, “Eureka!  Jarndyce hasn’t billed a minute of time in the last 18 months.  Now this clown is calling and asking me for the name of a lawyer!  I’ll sing the praises of Jarndyce and finally put Jarndyce to work after all this time.  I don’t really care about the new client anyway; it’s not a long-time institutional client, so I’ll give this client what it deserves.”

(Do you think I’ve been playing this game for too long, or what?)

In any event, why isn’t some firm advertising that it has the largest percentage of Chambers-ranked lawyer per capita?

That may not say much, but it says something.

To people who are convinced by the ratings system, that statistic says that the firm is the most consistently high-quality joint that you could hire.  If you get assigned a random lawyer at Small & Grate, the lawyer is likely to be pretty good.  If you hire a specific lawyer at Small & Grate, the randomly selected rest of the team is likely to be pretty good.

That statistic also gives law firms something to advertise.

Firms are regularly boasting that they have “100 Lawyers Ranked By Chambers” or “30 Illinois Super Lawyers” or “50 Lawyers In The Legal 500” or “We Recently Hired A Lateral Who You Never Heard Of In Some City You Don’t Care About.”

I think my boast is just as good: “Lawyer For Lawyer, We Were Just Rated The Best In The World!”

Come on, admit it: That’s not bad.

And my boast would work for lots of firms: The best in the country according to Chambers; the best in each of the 50 states according to Chambers; the best in the country according to the Legal 500; the best in each of the 50 states according to the Legal 500; the same for The Best Lawyers In America, and Super Lawyers, and probably a couple of other lawyer-rating outfits that aren’t coming to mind.

Come on, guys!  You’re missing a trick.

Count up the number of accolades per capita and start boasting!

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

* In a series of wide-ranging interviews across the political spectrum — or “Fake News,” per President Trump — the commander in chief’s closest allies admitted that they didn’t think he had any idea what he’d done or what kind of havoc he’d wreaked with his racist tweets. [Washington Post]

* According to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report contains “very substantial evidence” that the president is “guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.” Let’s see if Mueller’s testimony can change any minds on impeachment. [CNN]

* After one scandal too many, it looks like Deutsche Bank has decided to hire someone new to look after its legal and regulatory affairs. [Corporate Counsel]

* Students and alumni from Penn Law are calling for Professor Amy Wax’s ouster from faculty teaching duties following her latest foray into racism. [Big Law Business]

* Aside from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld and Clayton Kozinski, who else will be clerking for Supreme Court justices for the upcoming October term? In addition to these controversial choices, we’ve got the second blind person to ever clerk at the high court, and someone who was picked dead last in the 2010 MLB draft. [Associated Press]

* Joan Bullock, former dean of Thomas Jefferson Law School, has decamped to become Dean at the Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law. Congrats! [National Jurist]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Bashir Umar is a member of the force’s Mobile Air Defence Team that is deployed to Kano airport, northern Nigeria, for security duties.

The air force in a statement said he was on routine patrol with his colleagues when he found the parcel containing the lost money.

Instead of keeping it, the air force says the serviceman found a telephone number on the parcel which turned out to be the contact for the money’s owner.

Mr Umar will now be rewarded “so as to encourage other personnel of the service”, the air force says. Exactly how he will be rewarded is not clear.

This isn’t the first time honest staff have returned forgotten valuables at Nigeria’s airports.

Last August, the airport authorities in Lagos honoured two security guards for returning a “sum of money and expensive items”, and in September, a cleaner was commended for returning “lost valuable” of a passenger.

Bashir Umar was on patrol when he saw the parcel full of cashImage caption: Bashir Umar was on patrol when he saw the parcel full of cash

On Saturday morning (Jul. 20) local time Zimbabweans experienced a system blackout on Econet Wireless, the country’s biggest telecoms operator after a significant power outage.

Econet says the network challenges were caused by a fault that started when generators at its operations centre failed to kick in after a Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa) power outage.

But a power cut to Econet’s servers is no mere outage. It is effectively a major disruption to an already troubled economy teetering on the edge as it means 70% of Zimbabweans had no phones, internet and crucially EcoCash mobile money services. More than 14 million subscribers were caught off guard. People were stuck in banking halls, fuel queues, supermarkets and commuters to various places were stranded.

And in what seems like a never-ending cycle of misery for ordinary Zimbabweans in the last year, it is likely there will be more power cuts and ultimately more economic disruption due to the country’s currency troubles and—now, climate change.

Zesa has recently introduced an 18-hour load shedding schedule in most parts of the country because Zimbabwe relies on hydroelectric power from Lake Kariba along the border with Zambia where ongoing drought means water levels have dropped so low it’s forcing reduced electricity production.

In addition, Zesa owes over $50 million to Eskom in South Africa where it also get some of its electricity and the Zimbabwean government has repeatedly stated it doesn’t have enough foreign currency to settle the debt.

As for mobile operators they now have a significant expense as they have to use generators to power their stations but even that challenge is exacerbated because the country is in the middle of a fuel scarcity crisis which is causing prices of diesel to spike.

There are now real fears mobile operators will introduce a system where users in some parts of the country will not be able to access certain services on their networks as it has become too expensive to power up network towers using generators.

Zimbabwe’s economy has been deteriorating since president Emmerson Mnangagwa took over from his mentor Robert Mugabe in November 2017 through a military coup. The finance minister Mthuli Ncube last month scrapped a multi-currency regime and introduced a local currency which has not helped the situation by adding more uncertainty.

While some of the services had been restored eight hours later in the evening, subscribers were still reported to be having difficulties with Ecocash.

Economists see this as a huge blow to the economy as large chunks of the country’s economy runs through runs through electronic systems and mobile money dominated by EcoCash with 95% market share. It’s estimated around 5 million transactions a day more more than $200 million.

Post published in: Business

Instead it has relied on the US dollar along with a local money system pegged to the dollar.

The economy is no longer in its extreme inflationary spiral, but the country has continued to suffer from severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel.

Last month, the Zimbabwean authorities reintroduced the Zimbabwean dollar as the country’s sole legal tender.

Foreign Minister Sibusiso Moyo says this move has stabilised the economy.

But is he right? Reality Check looks at the country’s key economic indicators before and after the currency was reintroduced.

Fears of a return to hyperinflation

There has been understandable concern that the return of the Zimbabwe dollar would lead to a return to the chaotic hyperinflation which destroyed savings and made wages worthless.

The most recent figures suggest inflation has risen sharply over the last year. In May it was 98% and by June, annual inflation stood at 176%.

This is nowhere near the spiralling inflation levels of a decade ago, but the trend has not been encouraging.

So the introduction of the new currency comes at a sensitive time.

There’s also debate about whether the official number accurately captures the increase in goods on shop floors and at petrol stations, for instance.

Leading economists say it’s likely the cost of living is higher than official figures indicate.

Since the introduction of the new currency on 24 June, it has fallen against the US dollar.

This benefits Zimbabwe’s agricultural exports, mainly its tobacco sector.

But any positive effects are likely to be outweighed by more expensive imports, leading to further inflationary pressures on the economy.

The weaker currency is likely to have an impact across the economy, as importers struggle to get access to foreign exchange such as the US dollar in order to buy goods from abroad.

Taking a longer term view, the government has reduced spending since October last year and is now running a budget surplus, which it says is an indication of an improving economy.

Independent economists are sceptical about these numbers.

Harare, Zimbabwe – where the price of goods has increased

Falling value of salaries

Public sector workers in Zimbabwe are paid in local currency and there are fears that because of its decline against the US dollar, and because of inflation, they are now, in effect, earning less.

Zimbabwe’s main public sector workers’ union, Apex Council, said in a petition that the value of earnings has fallen “from at least $475 to a mere $47 currently for the lowest paid civil servant” since October last year.

Last week Cecilia Alexander, Apex Council chairwoman, said the government’s austerity plans had left workers mired in poverty.

Unions have, however, agreed a one-off payment of 400 Zimbabwean dollars ($45) to every worker in July, while talks on pay continue.

Post published in: Business

Matshela Energy will build a solar plant which is expected to produce 100MW of electricity, in a bid to ease Zimbabwe’s electricity supply crisis which has led to outages lasting up to 18 hours.In a statement released Sunday, the country’s energy regulator, Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) said the company will “construct, own, operate and maintain the 100MW solar power plant called Matshela Energy” in Gwanda, south of Zimbabwe.

“Subject to the Electricity Act and the terms and conditions of the licence, the licensee may supply electricity to any transmission, distribution or supply licensee who purchases electricity for re-sale and with approval of the Authority to any one or more consumers.”

Matshela Energy’s licence will expire in 2044, said ZERA. Koko resigned from Eskom in February 2018while the company was in the process of instituting a disciplinary hearing against him.

He faced four charges, including misleading Parliament about the McKinsey and Trillian payment, leaking confidential Eskom information to a Gupta associate and accepting flights to Dubai from a Gupta ally, as Fin24 previously reported.

On Saturday, Koko tweeted a statement from Zimbabwe authorities confirming the contract.

Matshela Energy brings to the region a 100MW Solar PV Power Plant with 240MWh of battery storage.

I was forcefully diverted to my destiny by President @CyrilRamaphosa & @mgigaba.

Little did they know they were pushing me to greater heights

Here is it. pic.twitter.com/yZVj3UnuwG

— Engineer Matshela Koko (@koko_matshela) July 20, 2019

In an effort to improve energy generation, Zimbabwe has been awarding licences to private companies to supply solar energy.

Zimbabwe Electricity Distribution Company (ZETDC) is currently the only electricity distributor. The imports country imports 50MW of electricity a day from Eskom.