July 2019
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The age of bots is here. While we have always been awash with automated crawlers and scrapers, it has now become overwhelming. For a long time, the reporting of website statistics in annual reports or as a service benchmark for law libraries was questionable. Now it is downright pointless.
There was
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I was a newspaper carrier as a kid. That has started to inform some of my thinking about how to consume the news these days. We are seeing that information ingesting is increasingly designed to be disruptive or outright damaging. It is a mixture of many things: small, portable devices, 24-hour
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I’m a satisficer, an embracer of the good-enough-for-now. I do not know when that started but it’s certainly a perspective I feel that I’ve had for most of my career. It may stem from being someone who works with technology which often breaks without an obvious cause. You can spend
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a little bit fascinated by the Anthropic-initiated Skills concept. In my mind’s eye, it fixes two of the significant problems with professional use of agentic AI (and generative AI): lack of expertise and lack of re-usability. The gap that I am unsure how to cross is moving from theory
Reading Time: 8 minutes
Most people I know are paid for time. It’s an artificial contract. Notionally, I am paid for 40 hours of work a week. There is some expectation that those 40 hours will occur within a specific schedule, like 9am to 5pm. Employers pay me for my time because they have neither
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Wither the web search. You may have started putting in a date delimiter of ChatGPT’s arrival as a cutoff for reliable results on the internet. You may have hacked your default browser search to cut out slop. One thing is for sure: web search is not what it was. Thirsty AEO
Reading Time: 7 minutes
“Hey, publisher, I have an idea for a book. It’s called ‘Law Practice Technology.’” Not my most creative pitch, I will confess. It took more than that but I will admit to a certain amount of uncertainty when I decided to see if I could find a publisher for a new
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am a policy skeptic. Which I think is a bit funny because I am (mostly) a rule follower. This can lead to unintended consequences when rules lead me to playing silly buggers but if you want a different outcome, think before you start rule-making. After working at the ABA and
Reading Time: 9 minutes
It is funny how you can be aware of something but, until you explain it to someone else, it doesn’t really take form. So far this semester, we have been looking at law practice technology from the perspectives of efficiencies: doing things more quickly and more accurately. Now that we’ve hit
Reading Time: 6 minutes
We are getting some work done, a bit of gardening. It’s landscaping, which is mostly a word that I use when it’s “more gardening than I want to do myself” because, while I love gardening, I’m an incrementalist. A new plant here, a repotted one over there. We are going to