If a team has to choose a software package from a group of contenders, one way to do that is to choose between package 1 and package 2, then between the winner of that and package 3, then between the winner of the first two competitions and the next package,…
I wrote a set of propositions about new ideas in relation to law departments. The National Law Journal published them on April 11th and I invite readers to here. More, I urge readers to leave a comment here or email me with something they have done that some other readers…
The NY Times reports on April 19, 2011, at D6 an oddity about learning. “[I]f you study something twice, in spaced sessions, it’s harder to process the material the second time, and people think it’s counterproductive.” So, to explain further, if you have pored over a decision or a debenture,…
The epistemology of the 19th century assumed that “facts” about the past were “out there” and that historians’ primary task was to collect and state them. Assiduous fact-gathering, they asserted, would bring us to know the truth about the past “as it really was.” In the 20th century this notion…
Watson’s triumph may be overplayed, but the PR coup points to a movement in which lawyers ally much more with software to become better decision-makers. So-called augmented cognition software has great allure in the law. Integrated wetware and software can be generic (See my post of Sept. 4, 2005: computers…
“[T]heory is a statement of concepts and their interrelationships that shows how and/or why a phenomenon occurs.” That definition from the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Jan. 2011 at 12, pushed me to contemplate the enormous amount of work that needs to be done for someone to even propose a theory of…
Power and knowledge accumulate together and feed each other. The more a lawyer knows about the law and the company the lawyer represents, the more influence that lawyer wields. The deeper the experience of a law firm partner, the more power that partner has to charge healthy fees. Information, as…
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book, History and the Enlightenment (Yale Univ. 2010) collects essays by the distinguished British historian. Trevor-Roper saw in the Enlightenment historians a seminal perspective, which is broadly called “philosophical history.” It rejects the mere accumulation of detail and fact; it rejects primary reliance on splendid examples of heroes…
Beliefs of general counsel regarding how best to relate to outside law firms vary enormously. Those ideologies, I submit somewhat puckishly, could be characterized with the well-known spectrum of political ideologies. Let me sketch my sense of the matchups. Reactionary general counsel favor turning back to days of yore when…
“We know that creative genius is not the same thing as intelligence.” The quote comes from a book review in the London Rev. of Books, March 3, 2011 at 11. Like idiot savants know a huge amount about a small area of knowledge, creative types may be hopeless intellectually outside…