World leaders should not be given an exception on social media to publish otherwise intolerable speech.
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In Memoriam — Clayton Christensen (1952-2020)
I added this to my course syllabus, “Law 2.0”: This year’s class is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School, who passed away on January 23, 2020. Prof. Christensen’s seminal work, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail”, is perhaps the single most predictive work of how […]
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Defining the Problem — Regulating Behavior
Retribution for its own sake is certainly questionable for a vacuum cleaner.
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The Naughty Vacuum Cleaner: (Re-)defining Free Will
I have a couple of robotic vacuum cleaners. I named one of them “Lil Miss Naughty” and the other “Dr. Evil”. The first one has a tendency to leave some spots a bit messy. The second one likes to attack cords and rugs. No matter what I say to them, they don’t change their behavior. […]
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Living as a Verb
Living and working intentionally
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Eight Is Great?
Why does the U.S. Supreme Court have an odd number of justices; what would happen if it didn’t? In the summer of 2014, well before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the ensuing political turmoil about filling his vacancy, I attended a conference at Stanford dealing with the logical formalisms of inconsistency (“Inconsistency Robustness”). It […]
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CNBC Article on AI in Law Firms
This month CNBC Journalist Eric Rosenbaum interviewed me for an article entitled “Can elite law firms survive the rise of artificial intelligence? The jury is still out“. Below is one of several sections in the article in which I am quoted. Dolin noted that Google has a dashboard that allows its legal counsel to monitor the billing […]
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Law Librarians: The Hidden Bastions of Data-Driven Innovation
It is not uncommon to hear of venture capital’s hesitancy to invest in legal tech startups. The challenges are many: a long sales cycle, cultural conservatism and entrenched processes to name a few. Within the academic community, we’ve heard a similar reason for not investing in evolving and increasingly important legal tools. A law school […]
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Death By A Thousand Cuts — In Gratitude
Larry Page once told me, back in the early days of Google, not to continue with failing projects. “Either find a way to move it forward,” he said, “or move on to something else.” This mindset is not really that different from the Serenity Prayer. The hard part, especially for social change, is the balance […]
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Legal Disruption? Uhm, It’s Complicated
A few months back, while I was still at Stanford (I’m now at Harvard Law’s CLP), I explored the nature of disruption in Big Law. I wanted to focus on Big Law because it is perhaps the component of the overall legal system at least as likely to experience disruption as any other. At the end […]
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