An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

Post by e15ctr0n » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:27 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #106

yourapostasy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software automation is purely responsible for the automation of a legal sub-industry: discovery. The most common interchange format for paperwork is TIFF scans and actual paper. A significant cost in litigation work was paying a small army of associate lawyers to manually read through this mountain of paperwork to find information relevant to the case. OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation,…

Automation also caused the e-discovery field to explode In the first place. There was a brief period after explosion of email where e-discovery got huge. Before email people would mostly talk in person or on the phone. People had to review documents but it was hundreds or documents or thousands. But after email, word processing, etc, now there were tens of thousands or maybe even millions of files to search. Digital…

Post by reality_czech » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 6:56 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #86

freyir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're talking about 2000 billable hours and 2500-3000 actual hours (50 to 60 hours a week). Of course, many engineers work similar hours, for far less than a NYC law associate.

Some engineers work that for 50k in the name of "working for a startup to be the next zucker".

Post by taxicabjesus » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #102

taxicabjesus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medicine has a few impossible problems. Family practice/internal medicine is arguably one of the most important roles, but many new doctors specialize so that they can better "cash in" on their M.D. degree. It's much cheaper to be proactive than reactive, but medicine doesn't think that way. Another problem is that Medicine spends a ton of money trying to keep old people alive for a few more days. For example, my gra…

> talked into have his pacemaker replaced i don't want to sound callice, but it seems like the "sales person" was trying to get more sales (as they are wont to do). A car sales man would talk you into replacing the car you don't need to replace because that's his job. It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to d…

Post by _9vpl » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #125

draw_down wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with doing a job for money.

I'm not saying lawyers shouldn't be paid. I'm saying that the idea of going to law school solely to make money is not optimal for the public good.

Post by mcguire » Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 10:45 PM UTC

rev_bird wrote: post #123

Pxtl wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lede. Yeah, it's one of those words.

It's intentionally misspelled, ostensibly to avoid old-school newsroom confusion with "lead," the linotype separators that sat between lines on a printing press. It's debated whether it's a word that was actually used back then, though.