March 30, 2004
Law School Takes A Long Time for a Reason
Kasei: The Importance of Fudgability, discovers that the life of the law is not logic, and that lawyers are hard to replace with expert systems:
A team of adjudicators spent a lot of their time reading application forms, deciding whether relevant criteria had been met, and then writing a response letter containing their decision. This seemed to be a straightforward rules-based system that could automated away, so we interviewed some staff, watched them do their job for a while, and implemented our replacement system. …
In hindsight, we had made several major mistakes - mistakes that seem to be repeated again and again throughout the software industry.
Part of the problem was how arrogant we were. We believed that we could spend a couple of days watching trained lawyers perform a highly-skilled job, talk briefly to them, and then make their jobs completely obsolete.
Worse, we made the job completely non-fudgable. In any human process there’s always a degree to which the outcome can be fudged by the person performing the task. Even when the rules are simple or well-understood, there are always cases when someone will have a compelling reason to do things differently. In this case we didn’t even know all the rules, and discovered to our horror that there were many more edge-cases than we’d imagined.
My students will be the next-to-last to be outsourced, right before the pizza delivery guys. (spotted via the blog with the great name, 0xDECAFBAD)
Posted by Michael : March 30, 2004 12:00 AM | Law School | TechnoLinks
Slashdot
It!
Outsourced by technology, perhaps not. Outsourced by lawyers in India, perhaps?!
Ahh...the joys of free trade. And why shouldn't a lawless country profit from our investment in a rule of law? After all, they're already making worthless the tens of thousands of dollars our Computer Science students spend on their educations--since Indians will do the work at our minimum wage. Why not let them flush the 3 years and 100K in tuition UM Law students (US citizens) down the crapper as well?
"About a week ago, West, the best-known name in legal publishing in the U.S., began publicly ruminating about joining the stampede to India. For the past few months, West has been running a pilot program in Mumbai, India, where several Indian lawyers are preparing summaries of unpublished U.S. court decisions."
Neal St. Anthony,
Star Tribune
January 16, 2004
On the otherhand...
http://www.nrilinks.com/news/n/7/10402.aspx
Sometimes I ponder that I'm probably failing to get with the times because I haven't found a way to leverage the labor pool of the planet in doing my job. Certainly I should be able to delegate elements of the job I do to other people paying them to make me (appear to be) more productive.
I would love to pay somebody a few dollars to proofread all my longer emails!