March 25th, 2013

Will Google Glass Kill? (Bumped and Updated)

Google’s Sergey Brin models Google Glass.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

[This was originally posted March 13, 2013. It was bumped and updated on March 25th due to proposed legislation in West Virginia; see below]

The chances of Google Glass being a factor in people being maimed and killed is approximately 100%. If you don’t know what Glass is, it’s the latest and greatest in whiz-bang technology, created apparently, just because it can be created.

Glass is a computer embedded in eye glasses that allows users to be online and see a computer screen in the lenses. It also has a camera.

These are designed, of course, for that segment of the population that forgot the basics of actual human interaction and need to be connected to their digital friends 24/7. Some of the software toys were displayed this past week at the South by Southwest technology conference in Austin.

There are many self-assured people who think they can multi-task; by walking or driving and web surfing at the same time. But people who think they are good at multi-tasking are actually the worst. Our brains aren’t wired that way.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see where this leads: Cocky Glass users will walk into intersections and be hit by cars because they are getting a Facebook update on the latest cat video, or tweeting about the latest basketball buzzer beater. There won’t be sympathy for them, of course, as people chalk this up to the culling of the masses with Darwinian behavior.

But what will be important are those that drive with them on, regardless of Google telling them “Don’t do that!” The chance of this is also about 100%, even if Google makes the glasses inoperable when moving faster than x mph. Folks will figure out a way to disable it, perhaps by killing off the GPS signal, because you know, they need to know how many likes and re-tweets they got for that online joke they cracked. Some things can’t wait. With smart phones we have the entirety of human knowledge in our pockets and this is what we use them for. Ben Franklin would be proud.

The blunt reality is that almost all auto collisions occur due to distracted driving. We see it often with texting, cell phone use, eating and noodling with the knobs on the radio, assuming you can still find a knobbed radio. A moment’s inattention and you won’t see that the car in front of you has stopped. At 55 mph, a car will travel 160 feet in just two seconds — half a football field. The margin of error in driving is preciously small.

Perhaps you think me a bit of a curmudgeonly anti-technology anti-Luddite pining for the old days of Prodigy and dial-up service. But I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think there is substantial backlash already occurring when phones are whipped out at dinner tables so that people can update their status, while ignoring the dinner companions they are actually with.

Google Glass, to the extent it finds any substantial market, will only exacerbate that. But if we are lucky, the backlash will be signficant as more people see what we are losing. Perhaps I’m a dreamer.

I don’t expect to view Google glass users as avante grade, hipster anythings, as these folks will no doubt see themselves. I expect instead, when they do appear, to see them through the prism of my own eyes as people unable to deal with the reality that sits before them.

My two sheqels on the subject. Your mileage may vary.

March 25 update: Legislators in West Virginia have now proposed legislation outlaw driving while using Google Glass, deciding to act even before the product was available on store shelves. According to the CNet article, this bill seeks to make it illegal to drive while “using a wearable computer with head mounted display.”

One of the legislators supporting the bill is Gary G. Howell, who had this to say about the government being proactive with this legislation:

“I am a libertarian, and government has no business protecting us from ourselves, but it does have a duty to make sure I don’t injure or kill someone else,” he explained.

More here: Don’t Glass and drive — lawmakers seek to ban Google Glass on the road

March 21st, 2013

10 Signs The New Matter is a Dog (Before you even consider the merits)

I’d been thinking of writing this post for awhile, and then Max Kennerly went and did a similar one, putting a fuse under my butt to get it done. His subject was Five Case Selection Tips for New Plaintiff’s Lawyers.

But while his was about the types of cases to reject, mine is more about the people that call. After being a lawyer for awhile, it becomes pretty easy to spot which cases are dogs…before you even consider the merits. Since the personal injury bar gets paid on contingency, vetting the case is pretty darn important.

We have a name for lawyers that don’t do a good job screening cases: Bankrupt.

So, without further ado, my ten quick and dirty rules for determining the case isn’t worth taking, regardless of its facts, and the potential client most likely shouldn’t be allowed in the door:

1. The call comes on Thanksgiving Friday, a real holiday, or some other time outside normal business hours. While that might be normal for criminal defense, for obvious reasons, it isn’t for personal injury law. If it isn’t important enough for the potential client to call when someone is likely to be around, the case isn’t likely to be any good.

2. The person refuses to speak to a paralegal. This means the potential client is familiar with law office procedures because the matter has been rejected many times before.

3. The potential client already has the medical records. This means the matter has been reviewed by others and rejected (though, in all fairness, you should find out who did the rejecting).

4. The request comes via email, but is not addressed to me with any salutation. This means the matter has been emailed to numerous lawyers.

5. The request is a manifesto. It usually comes in Word format, single spaced, many pages, and rambles all over creation. You are neither the first, nor the last, to get this screed. You will not make it past the first paragraph, as it is utterly unreadable. If there’s a point, you’ll never find it.

6. The person who demands to know right away what the case is worth. The answer is nothing.

7. The person who guarantees the defendant will settle quickly. No, they won’t, as the caller is ill-informed (or delusional) about litigation. (Kennerly has this one also.)

8. The person who won’t answer your questions when you interrupt to solicit important information, and plows ahead to tell the story the same way it’s been told to the last 20 lawyers.

9. The quarrelsome caller. When you hit them with the claims the defense will make, they argue with you in a manner that indicates they’ve heard these issues before.

10. The statute of limitations is about to expire. This means the potential client knew what the deadline was, and delayed. Even if the case has merit, this client will delay everything else once you get started. Don’t get started; the case isn’t as important to this person as you think it is.

Is it possible that there is a real case lurking within this list? Sure, anything is possible. But that’s not the way to bet.

March 20th, 2013

Sen. Rob Portman, Gay Rights, and Tort “Reform”

Last week Ohio Senator Rob Portman made headlines when he reversed his stance on gay marriage. For a Republican, that was pretty big news. He did it after finding out his son was gay and reflecting on the meaning of love, marriage and religion.

But that isn’t why I’m writing.

I’m writing because, in his explanation, he went beyond the love/marriage/religion elements to reflect on the proper role of government in society. He wrote:

British Prime Minister David Cameron has said he supports allowing gay couples to marry because he is a conservative, not in spite of it. I feel the same way. We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives.

So if he, as a conservative, believes in minimal government interference in people’s lives, why does he campaign on giving big government protections and immunities with various tort “reform” proposals that close the courthouse doors to those seeking justice?

One of the first things he did as a freshman senator in 2011 was introduce legislation that would impose a new statute of limitations on medical liability lawsuits and cap punitive and noneconomic damages.

His political view is summarized here:

Medical malpractice costs and the mounting costs of defensive medicine must be reduced through sensible legal reform and better health information.
Source: www.robportman.com/1on-the-issues (11/22/2010)

Really Senator? Is that what limited government is all about? Interceding on the rights of people seeking justice by protecting big business and insurance companies?

If someone would be kind enough to forward this to Portman, he might also learn that the artificial caps he supports because of “defensive medicine” have been proven by empirical evidence to be a complete bust. Health care costs in Texas, which instituted artificial one-size-fits-all caps in 2003 didn’t go down. Costs have actually gone up.

So Portman gets a special twofer: His tort “reform” policy contradicts his stance on federal power, and the basis of his policy is factually wrong.

If Portman wants to reign in federal power, as he states in part of his argument favoring gay rights, he may wish to revisit his other positions that call for increasing that power. Especially when increasing it fails to support his theories.

More on the hypocrisy between conservatism and tort reform here: Does the Tea Party Believe in Conservatism or Tort “Reform”? (8 Questions)

March 15th, 2013

The Death of RSS and the Rise of Twitter

When news broke yesterday that Google was dumping GoogleReader there were two kinds of reactions from bloggers noted Bruce Carton at Legal Blog Watch: Those for whom it was the end of the world and those who shrugged.

Carton was in full panic mode. I was a shrugger. I stopped using my RSS feed about a year or two ago, as it simply died a slow death for me.

And that’s because most anyone that I would have followed on RSS is placing links to their blog posts on Twitter. And Twitter also had the advantage of having (short) comments on those blog posts, which might also give you an idea if something was interesting or contentious. RSS was not just redundant, but inferior. (And, as I noted the other day, it can make you a better writer of legal briefs.)

Between Twitter, RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, blog post comments, YouTube, listservs, all manner of open discussion forums and whatever else is incubating now that I don’t know about, participating online can easily be a 24/7 job/hobby/distraction. But I have a real job and a real family, as most of you do, and I have to pick and choose. RSS lost. I also have an account at LinkedIn that I rarely check/use, I stopped using forums years ago, and I haven’t yet figured out what to do with Google+, or had the time to explore it.

I haven’t always been a fan of Twitter, and ripped it right after it came out. But I’ve come to appreciate its utility, an appreciation that comes only by carefully screening those I might follow.

When someone follows me, I generally look at their last three tweets (or “twits” as Scott Greenfield quite appropriately calls them). If those tweets are about a local accident, in the desperate hope the victim will log on to Twitter and find this brilliance, I know this is not a person to follow. So too with anyone in legal marketing. I need more phone calls and emails from these hucksters like I need a hole in the head.

But worse still are those that respond to an individual with something like “Ha!”, apparently forgetting that many others will see this gibberish, not just the one that sent the message being responded to. And even worse are those that write, “Thanks for the RT!” Thanks for sharing your insecurity with me by noting how important an RT is to you.

Why anyone would want this crap clogging their Twitter feed and rendering it useless is beyond me. Links and short comments on relevant stories are what works.

And you know those folks that are following thousands of others? It’s pretty clear such folks are not reading their own Twitter feeds. I don’t give a damn if they follow me or not.

Last year I spoke at a conference on social media down in Washington DC. And a woman that followed after me was hit by an audience question: If someone follows you on Twitter, are you supposed to follow them back? “Yes!” she cried, as that was the polite thing to do. I almost fell off my chair as I recognized the entire audience had just become dumber for having heard this.

Twitter can be a good tool that certainly replaces RSS. Just be sure to carefully cull the list of those you follow. You can follow me if you want (@Turkewitz) but don’t be upset if I don’t follow back. My brain has a limited capacity.

That’s my two pesos. Bruce Carton’s mileage will vary. And remember that no one will ever put the number of your Twitter follows on your headstone.

Elsewhere on the subject:

Really Simple Sign of the Future (Greenfield)

The End of GoogleReader: A Sign of Blogging’s Decline and Lessons for Lawyers (Elefant)

March 12th, 2013

Legal Briefs, Twitter Style

Lawyers love to write. And write. And write. Some “briefs” go on for dozens of pages, with the author often scrambling around in search of an issue, much to the pain and frustration of the reader.

Does using Twitter help, given that writers are constrained to only 140 characters?

Yesterday I tweeted a story from the NY Post about a lawyer that wanted to exclude all Jews from a jury, claiming that with his militant Islamist client “that there’s going to be inflammatory testimony about Jews and Zionism, I think it would be hard for Jews to cast aside any innate antipathy.”

But despite the limitations of Twitter, and the highly charged nature of the lawyer’s claim, a few lawyers were able to brief the subject anyway:

Max Kennerly took a shot:

Seems to me he could cure most of the assumed problems in voir dire, w/o categorical exclusion RT @bcuban @Turkewitz http://bit.ly/10tvuNP

And then Ted Frank:

@MaxKennerly @bcuban @turkewitz Inducing error at this trial gives client free bite at apple; if guilty verdict, new lawyer gets reversal.

And David Sugerman:

@tedfrank Huh? I’m no crim law expert, but invited error. Def gets reversal for getting relief def sought??@MaxKennerly @bcuban @Turkewitz

And Ted Frank again:

@DavidSug @maxkennerly @bcuban @turkewitz Ineffective assistance; plus defendant has standing to raise constitutional injury to juror.

Of course, because each lawyer was using the @ symbol to copy others, they were each using even less than the full allotment of 140 characters.

Did they do a full and complete job discussing the story? Of course not. But using very few words each of them undertook the most essential part of lawyering: issue identification. Because if you can’t identify issues, you won’t succeed writing any kind of brief.

Twitter, while a pretty big waste of time for many, can also be used as a teaching tool. If you force lawyers to state their case in 140 characters, it forces them to remove extraneous information and argument.

Legal writing guru Bryan Garner teaches lawyers to frame their issues in just 75 words. If you can’t do that, he argues, you haven’t sufficiently identified the issue and simplified your writing. Think of Twitter as a more extreme form of Garner’s 75-word rule.