The untethered lawyer

Cookie Law Conundrum: Do you know what your webmaster is busy baking? Karma. I may have been a scoundrel in a previous lifetime. As penance, I voluntarily reviewed ten webpage privacy statements from five prestigious law firms, four somewhat intrusive social media organizations, and one highly regarded national magazine for lawyers in Canada. Did I say well written? That too. Cookie policies range from the buried deep within the privacy cookie jar to the flashing K-mart end of aisle cookie sale. Cookies refer to the little crumbs of text file code that websites place on users’ browsers that land on the organization’s webpage. These cookies do not contain any coding themselves, so they cannot transfer any viruses or other types of malware. But like real cookie packaging, you must read to the bottom of the ingredient list to determine what your system ingests. Cookies come in two major flavors. Session cookies store information about user page activities so that users can easi...

GoogleLaw and Creative Destruction of the Legal Profession Google and Artificial Intelligence may not be the end of the legal profession, but boy, can you see it from here. I anticipate encountering what Schumpeter euphemistically called creative destruction. Innovation destructs archaic business models and creatively releases capital to be deployed elsewhere. A benign description of being out on the street with your law degree. Perhaps too hyperbolic, but for example Google has made a database of Federal and State case law and legal journal articles available via its  Google Scholar  search.  In their defense, lawyers can now purchase on Amazon the “ Please Do Not Confuse Your Google Search With My Law Degree” coffee mug.  For a simpler DIY approach, YouTube displays over 146 videos on Family Law. This also includes shuffle playlist for greater variety. For comparison, A.I. factors into over 38% of regular enterprise planning for mainly customer int...

The Quintessential NAFTA negotiation guide The US political extravaganza has provided substantial entertainment for the world and Canadians. We have been able to distance ourselves somewhat from the rhetoric. However Canada now finds itself within the Trump World ‘Splash Zone’. NAFTA ‘tweaking’ has surfaced and to paraphrase the President, we are renegotiating the North American ‘Stupid Trade’ Agreement. NAFTA has provided great benefits to all three countries and created an economic juggernaut of more than $20 trillion GDP. But the US appears to be following a new policy that not only must they succeed, all others must fail. The recent US Trade Representative (USTR) NAFTA aspirational paper states that “since the deal came into force in 1994, trade deficits have exploded, thousands of factories have closed, and millions of Americans have found themselves stranded, no longer able to utilize the skills for which they had been trained.” This sounds similar to your spouse of 23 y...

The New Immortals Immortals shall soon walk among us. They may also crawl, roll and perhaps hover. Yes, definitely hover.  The immortals refer to artificially intelligent persons (AIPs), and by ‘us’ I mean natural persons. The European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs recent report recognized that humankind stands on the threshold of an era of sophisticated robots and other manifestations of artificial intelligence ("AI"). The Committee saw the need to legislate this area relatively quickly as self-driving cars are making their appearance. The fundamental question is what sort of legal status should be granted to AIPs. Natural persons want to avoid any “Battle of the AIPs” future scenarios. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, dramatically starts off the Committee’s report. The Committee thought that by addressing people’s real concerns up front, they could deal with the more substantive issues. The Committee recognizes that people have fantasi...