Ernie The Attorney

The Young Turks of Information Processing

Last Saturday I taught a two hour skills course to 30 or so Loyola Law Students about Digital Lawyering. Almost every one of them had a laptop in front of them, which was good. I was hooked to the Internet and demonstrated how to find things using Internet services like Google Reader, Delicious and so forth. As I referred to these services I sensed that the students were going to those sites and reading along for themselves. As I said, I think this is a good thing.

I realize that most people in my generation would be taken aback, believing it to be disrespectful for students to be doing something else while I was talking. So, let me explain why it doesn't bother me. First, I'm happy to share whatever thoughts I have with whomever wants to listen. If, in addressing 30 students only 3 of them are actually listening, that's totally fine. I'm there for those 3 students and I appreciate the opportunity to help them. If the other ones don't care about me, then I'm not concerned about them either.

The reality, however, is that most of the students were listening. But the thing is: they weren't only listening. They were also connecting dots by doing their own online research as I talked to them. This is how students today behave. I know this mostly because I have a teenage daughter (as well as two slightly older kids) and I see how she gathers information using her computer or iPhone. It's fascinating to see how adept she is at finding information. So, my first reason for not being concerned about students using their laptops is that I understand that they're actively gathering information, as opposed to passively receiving it.

The other reason that I'm not bothered, and actually happy to see students using their computers as I talk is this. My generation is pretty lame when it comes to gathering information in the digital world. In law this manifests itself most starkly in the world of e-discovery. Discovery, in law, is all about getting the low-down on what really happened in a lawsuit. You can get the low-down by interviewing witnesses or deposing them, but that takes time, costs money and is inherently unreliable. What people say happened is not usually exactly what happened.

To really get a handle on what occurred in a case with serious factual disputes (which is most cases), you have to look at documents. And today when I say 'documents' I mostly mean 'electronic documents.' Sure, there's still a lot of paper to sift through (but you should digitize it anyway). Increasingly the bulk of written communications is in email. People who email tend to make the kind of casual comments that litigators like me really appreciate. So, these days, email is what you want to look at first and foremost.

Most lawyers have trouble with email (and digital information in general) because they don't understand how to navigate that world. Lawyers who don't search for things on Internet are the worst. They lack a fundamental skill that's needed to efficiently attack digital information. Naturally they're inept when it comes to handling electronic discovery. Some of them are committing serious malpractice. But, of course, they have no idea.

The next generation of lawyers will not have this problem, or at least it won't be a prevalent problem like it is today. The young turks coming out of law school today don't have a passive relationship to information. They attack digital information the way sharks attack wounded seals.

An example of this mindset was presented to me after my lecture to the Loyola law students. Two fellows who happened to be brothers came up to the podium to chat.  We started talking to me about iPhone applications, and wound up talking about 'Words with Friends,' which is basically a word game like Scrabble. I told them that I was playing with my daughter and that I was sure that she was cheating because she always won (and I knew that she didn't have as large a vocabulary as me). I mentioned that I was going to have to resort to using one of the online word-finder tools to keep up with what she was doing.

One of the brothers said that they don't allow cheating like that when they play Words With Friends. I said, "what do you mean don't allow cheating? How can you know if the other person is cheating?" He said that if someone he is playing against uses a word he suspects is not in their vocabulary he checks online to see what if that word was the top suggestion in an online word-finder. If it is then he knows the person is probably cheating and calls them on it. His matter-of-fact response caught me totally off-guard.

So, think about this for a second and see if you grasp the power of this statement. And by 'this' I don't mean as applied to scrabble or word games. Think about the mindset. Law students today use the web like detectives. They know how to gather information (fine), but they instinctively know how to trace back the steps that other people use to find information. This mindset and the online research skills that come with it are dangerous. At least to some people.

For starters, these students will have a huge advantage when it comes to doing electronic discovery. They haven't even started practicing law and already they're leagues ahead of lawyers who've been in the business for years.  They know how to gather digital information, and they have no resistance to adopting new ways of gathering it if that provides an instant advantage (e.g. no one is going to have to convince them of the value of concept searching). These lawyers will know how to zero in on key information quickly and inexpensively. So if I were a traditional lawyer (e.g. one with poor Internet skills or someone who has trouble with digital information), I'd be afraid of the next generation of lawyers.

The next generation will not graduate from law school and immediately surpass veteran lawyers.  But they have a skill that's already in high demand, but short supply.  Veteran lawyers can't quickly learn how to gather and process digital information. Most young lawyers will learn how to practice law fairly quickly, or at least much faster than the veteran lawyers will learn what they should be learning.

Street fightin' mayor (who uses Twitter)

Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark, New Jersey and by all accounts he's been pretty successful.  He was 34 when he first ran for mayor in 2002 against the four-term incumbent, Sharpe James.  I didn't know much about this until last night when I watched the documentary, Street Fight, which was about the 2002 campaign.  Booker was not expected to be a serious contender, but he ran an amazing grass roots campaign and missed getting elected by a small margin.

I highly recommend the movie, because it shows what can happen when someone has been in power for a long time.  Sharpe James was callous and deceitful, and it was easily captured on film (even though he tried to ban cameras whenever he felt they were being used by non-allies).  Even though Sharpe James won the 2002 election, Booker ran again in 2006, at which point James decided maybe the state senate was more to his liking.  Booker won easily in 2006 because of his persistence.

Booker made good on his promise to solve the long-term crime problem, something that James never seemed to be able to address.  Crime has dropped significantly in the City of Newark, which currently leads the nation in violent crime reduction. From 2006-2008, crime dropped by the following percentages: murders 36%, shooting incidents 41%, rapes 30%, and auto thefts 26%. In 2008, Newark had its lowest murder rate since 1959. And in April of 2008, Sharpe James was convicted of fraud for conspiring to rig the sale of nine city lots to his mistress.  He's in jail now.

I've been following Cory Booker on Twitter, at the recommendation of my friend who told me about the movie and I find him to be an inspiring twitterer.  His tweets are all inspirational (e.g. "Believe in the genius of your dreams / No matter how impossible they may seem").  Booker has over 1 million followers on Twitter, and I can see why.  Last night after watching the movie, I decided to send a short tweet to him saying I enjoyed the movie and hoped he'd keep up the good fight.  Of course, I didn't expect any reply.  My tweet was intended as a little gesture, sort of like giving someone a thumbs up as they drive by waving at the crowd.

This morning I got a direct message from Cory Booker on Twitter: "Thanks for watching the movie and for the generous tweet. Cory."  And he started following me back on Twitter. Isn't that interesting? Here's a guy who wins people over by walking the streets and picking up support one person at a time, and yet he also manages to make full use of a new tech communication tool as well.

Do I think he's really responding personally to people like me?  I doubt it, but that's just because I have a mindset about how politicians (and busy leaders) tend to behave. I hope he's not spending too much time on Twitter, but it doesn't really matter what's going on.  He's getting amazing things done in his city and he's found a way to connect with a lot of people.  However he's doing it, I hope that Mitch Landrieu will pay him a visit and take some notes.

Google fiber in New Orleans? It's so obvious if you look at it right.

By now you may have heard that Google is going to select a few places to build an ultra-high speed broadband network. This announcement has generated quite the stir in our tech world. Outside the United States this would not be such a big deal. Folks in Sweden are used to surfing the web at ungodly rates of speed, and so are people in Japan. And they pay about the same as we pay for our measly broadband. Google is going to spend A LOT of money to answer this question: what kind of amazing stuff would happen in United States if we had an super fast network?

Now let's be clear about what's going on. Google is not getting into the business of building network infrastructure; that's not it's mission. Google, however, is willing to catalyze the build-out process. The strategic imperative is picking the right places to experiment with.  So how is Google going to decide who gets to experience tech-nirvana first?

Well, it's sort of a mystery.  But here are some things that we know.

Google has begun accepting applications in response to its request for information (or 'RFI'). Interested communities have until March 26, 2010 to submit a response. And Google is looking for communities that have between 50,000 and 500,000 residents. 

What else? 

In making its decision, Google's obviously going to factor in the difficulty of installing the fiber network. That probably means both the 'technical difficulty' and 'political difficulty' (e.g. obtaining permits and avoiding approval bottlenecks etc.). I would imagine that Google would want some project diversity, to prove the experiment works across a range of community sizes and types. 

Remember: Google wants other companies to build the fiber network across the United States.  Google is just looking to jump-start the process. That means Google needs, more than anything, for the experiment to do more than just succeed in these select places.  Ideally, at least one of these communities should succeed in a way that gets a lot of positive attention. 

Solving the tech-hurdle of installation is easy if Google goes to a small rural community; but, if folks there don't do anything interesting it won't create the P.R. stir that Google's really wants. Google needs communities that will make use of this new power in an interesting way, and one that's visibly dramatic.

That's why New Orleans is an ideal market for Google's experiment. Sure, Googlers might have some initial reservations about picking New Orleans. But those reservations are based on false assumptions and insufficient knowledge. Let's dispense with their likely reservations right off the bat.

Tech-hurdles

I don't know if there are major tech hurdles involved with installing fiber in New Orleans. Ironically, from what I understand, it's possible that Katrina made the task of laying fiber more feasible than it otherwise would have been. In case you hadn't noticed whilst driving around town, we're just now getting around to doing a lot of street repair. I'm told, by a friend who lays fiber for a living, that underground is the best place to put fiber. In addition to the massive street repair that's just getting started, we're also supposed to be undergoing massive repair to our sewer system. 

So, if we're digging up streets and sewer lines, why not lay some fiber too?  But, all in all, the key point is that New Orleans isn't likely to present any greater tech challenges than any other medium sized city. Even if it did, as I'll explain below, those additional challenges (if any) would be worth it.

Political hurdles

New Orleans sometimes gets a rap for being unfriendly to business. That may have been true before Katrina (although I think it was not as bad as people sometimes believed), but it's not true anymore. Obviously, our national image before Katrina, or right after, was not great.  Mayor Ray Nagin has not exactly been (how shall we put it?) a PR virtuoso. Before Katrina, Nagin was on a roll (the good kind), and people forget that Nagin was a champion of technology when he came into office. Certainly, he'd do what could to pave the way for Google, but...

Nagin isn't going to be in office past May of this year. That's when our new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, will take office. Mitch will be at least as supportive as Nagin would be (almost certainly more supportive), but with some added benefits. 

First, Mitch is a much better ambassador for the city than Nagin. Mitch has real charisma and charm, and he knows how to sell this city to outsiders. Remember how hard he campaigned to bring the Hornets basketball franchise here? The Hornets deal showed that Mitch knows how to build political consensus and galvanize community support when it really counts. Oh, and being the Lieutenant Governor for the past few years gives him a good handle of state-wide politics, in case that's an issue.  

Finally, Mitch's sister is a U.S. senator, which doesn't hurt whenever federal assistance is required. In short, Mitch is going to be at least as enthusiastic about the prospect of Google investing here as Nagin would be, but he's a much, much better ambassador, and he has far more political resources at his disposal. That takes care of the possible hurdles...

So why is New Orleans an obvious choice?

Assuming that there are no hurdles (political or otherwise), why lay fiber in New Orleans as opposed to the many other communities vying for this opportunity?

1. New Orleans is the right size.

Before Katrina the population in New Orleans wasn't even 500,000 (the upper end of the ideal population range). Right now our population is a little over 300,000. Google should want to prove that the fiber experiment can work in a mid-sized city, and we are the perfect mid-sized city. And, as an added bonus, our population is growing at a very rapid pace (we were recently ranked the fastest growing city in the U.S.). 

No doubt much of the rapid growth is due to the return of displaced residents. But, it also stems from the influx of young entrepreneurs, and from the community volunteers brought here by Katrina. The Teach for America program has lured many young people who came to help for awhile, but then decided to stay. We know we're attracting young people in droves, so we just need to show the Googlers what's really happening here. What Google needs to learn is that New Orleans is already poised to become a haven for young creatives and techies.  Kind of like Seattle. But, better because...

2. New Orleans is a boiling cauldron of creativity.

Google says it wants to prove that exciting new things can happen with an ultra-high speed network. That will require a community with a strong dose of creative DNA. A city like New York may have a lot of creative energy, but that's only because it's a large city with massive financial capital. New Orleans's creative output is grass roots, and home-grown. 

We invented the only authentic American music. You may have heard of it; it's called jazz, and it is the headwater of rock, blues, and pretty much everything else that isn't classical or foreign music. If you want to hire session musicians for a film soundtrack you'd probably go to L.A. (another large city that imports the bulk of its creative talent). But, if you want to record music that stirs your soul --blues, zydeco, funk, rock, Dixieland, jazz, fusion, rap, whatever-- then you better head to New Orleans. Anyone in the music industry gets this.

Why did Dave Matthews come live in New Orleans for six months while he recorded his latest album? Why does David Byrne come and hangout at Tipitinas? Why does Lenny Kravitz live here? The question is not why they come here (they love the creative mix and the wonderful culture), the question is why do they ever leave? Often, it's because they need to work with other folks outside New Orleans. Maybe Google's experiment would show that leaving New Orleans isn't necessary.

What if Lenny Kravitz could collaborate with musicians and engineers outside New Orleans while he stayed here? Maybe Google fiber could show that musicians here could do 'live recordings' with musicians in other parts of the country. That kind of realtime musical collaboration is one thing would definitely require a lot of bandwidth.

I could go on about all the ways New Orleans can showcase the use of fiber, but that's beyond the scope of this blog post (check the NOLAFiber.com site for information as it comes in). We have a lot of creative output here, and it's not one-dimensional pablum like some other places I won't name. New Orleans is proud to be called "funky and untidy," as famed British actress Helen Mirren observed (she also said we are her "contact with Europe in America" and that she "plans to die here."). The point is New Orleans is quirky in a good way that people enjoy; Google people will 'get' that. The tourism industry is huge here, not because we have a top-notch PR team and a bunch of gimmicks.  We have soul.

Look, pretty much any mid-sized place is going to have hospitals, colleges, businesses, and whatever else typical cities have. Only one mid-sized place in this country is brimming with charm, creativity, and culture. New Orleans is an international city as much as it is an American one. Ask a bunch of people in Europe to name an American city other than New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. And then see how many name New Orleans. For gods sake, New Orleans is used in the lyrics of at least 150 popular songs. 

Here's the question Google should be asking itself: what if people around the world access to more of New Orleans culture through the Internet? Would people want to be able to see the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival live on their superfast internet pipes in Sweden, Paris, or Tokyo? 

You betcha.

3. Success in New Orleans is a front page story that writes itself

We're now four years past the Katrina debacle: the hand-wringing festivals and pity-parties are over. People are not waiting for assistance from anywhere or hoping for a miracle. New Orleans is back on it's feet because of self-determination and hard work, and people outside pretty are starting to realize this. And if they didn't realize it before this year's Superbowl, they do now. 

More people watched the Saints beat the Colts than had ever watched a single TV broadcast before. And that's not just trivia; that's an important fact. One hundred and six million people around the world learned that New Orleans has been vastly underestimated. Katrina knocked us down, but we got back up faster than people anticipated. We've been on a bold new path since Katrina, but we're only just now starting to see some impressive results. And I'm not talking about sports now (which really isn't all that important as a measure of our overall community improvement). Our schools are improving, and that's pretty much traceable to Katrina, weird as that may seem to an outsider.

In the next five years New Orleans is going to make even more dramatic improvement. That's going to happen whether Google invests here or not. But if Google were to put fiber here it would accelerate that improvement in some important ways. Then Google could take a lot of credit, and bask in the inevitable torrent of favorable publicity. The stories would practically write themselves. I can just imagine an in-depth piece in Esquire about the "bold gamble" behind Google's success in New Orleans. And that won't be the only "bold gamble" story that gets written.

Hey Google: act fast in New Orleans

If Google wants a firework of positive PR, then it should have fiber up and running here by 2013. Why then?   Well, because, assuming the Mayans are wrong about the world ending the year before, Google could showcase its "bold gamble" when New Orleans hosts the Superbowl in 2013. That's right, the Superbowl (king of all hype-fests) will be played here in 2013.

Can you imagine the outrageous hoopla if New Orleans had fiber by then? All the captains of industry and media moguls flocking to a fun-filled city (New Orleans always ranked as one of the top two Superbowl host cities). Except now it's a city teeming with high speed fiber. The moguls will experience the "bold gamble" firsthand, while 100 million people around the world experience it through some kind of hair-raising new broadcast stream that takes advantage of the new fiber. 

Yeah, New Orleans is pretty much the "no-brainer choice" for Google's project. Will Google realize that? I don't know, but I am willing to predict this: if they send a team to do a site evaluation here you can call it a 'done deal.' 

Smart people can only overlook an obvious choice for so long.

Update: if you are from New Orleans and know of cool things that you or your friends would be able to do with ultra-high speed fiber, go here and tell us your story.  The more good stories we collect, the easier it will be for Google to see what's obvious.

Can you save money copying documents in the Clerk of Court's office?

Arbitrage: "exploiting price differences in different markets or in different forms."

Here's a price difference worth exploiting if you're a lawyer who spends money making copies of courthouse records. The state court for New Orleans charges $1.00 per page to make copies of official documents, which is about 20 times what the local copy shops charge. How can they get away with this? Answer: because you can't take the records over to the local copy shop. And this constraint no doubt applies to many other courts around the country.

But what if you could bring a small scanner into the clerk's office and scan the documents yourself? A Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 is very portable, doesn't need an external power connection (it uses the USB connection to your laptop), and only costs $300. There's even a Mac version. But to use the ScanSnap you need a computer, and if you're only going to scan a few pages it might not be worth it to lug all that equipment into the clerk's office. In that case, you could use your iPhone and an application called DocScanner ($7.99) to take pictures of the pages you wanted to capture, and have them turned into PDFs that you can email to yourself or anyone you desire.

In the case of the ScanSnap you'd be saving money after you scanned 300 pages. With the iPhone application your break-even would be 8 pages. So, now you know how to save money at the clerk's office using arbitrage. But there's one more thing you need to know.

In Louisiana there are laws that protect the clerk's monopoly on making copies. For example there is La. Code of Civil Procedure art. 251 which basically says this: you can't use fixed or portable scanners to make copies of court documents in the clerk's office. And since you can't take the documents out of the clerk's office, you're pretty much screwed. At least that's how it is in Louisiana. So check your state laws before you head out to court with your ScanSnap or iPhone.

I would have thought that this law would not be enforced for folks who just wanted to make a quick copy with their iPhone, but I have a lawyer friend who tried to do just that and was chased down by a clerk and told he had to pay for the copies he made. That's what I love about our modern civilization: even when you find a way to save money or do something faster you often find that you can't really save the money or time because you have to pay the troll that lives under the bridge. Troll, thy name is government.

All Your Privacy Are Belong To Us

Sun MicroSystem CEO Scott McNealy famously said, "privacy is dead, deal with it." Apparently, a lot of people are having trouble dealing with it. Facebook and its advertising partners were sued for millions of dollars because they automatically published began monitoring and publishing what Facebook users were doing on sites like Blockbuster.com and Zappos.com. This resulted in a man's wife finding out about his surprise jewelry purchase. Fortunately, it was for her. But still, he's having trouble getting over it. And so he and some other folks sued Facebook in a class action suit that recently settled. Facebook denies that it did anything wrong, but they were sued under a federal statute that makes it illegal to reveal video rental information (a law that was passed after Judge Robert Bork's failed nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, which involved revelations about his rental choices).

More recently, Google released a new service called Google Buzz, which hooks into existing Google tools such as gMail and Google Reader. Some people like the new social networking tool, but others are (predictably) having trouble dealing with it. The problem is that Google automatically connects users in the new Buzz service to those people that are most often emailed in the users gMail account. Turns out that a woman who was divorced had her abusive ex-husband automatically added to her Buzz account. And his friends were added too. Yikes!

I wonder if this is what Scott McNealy was envisioning? I don't think so, and here's why.

When the Internet first took off people feared most the possibility that governments would have access to otherwise private data. They were also were afraid of insurance companies or other institutions doing the same thing. They weren't afraid of social networking sites like FaceBook or Google Buzz, because those didn't exist and nothing like them was even contemplated. What's most amazing is not how quickly these companies have grown, but how quickly they've started abusing people's privacy. Is this because they're insensitive? Is it a failure of imagination? Or are they just greedy and arrogant?

I don't think it's the later, although I'm not willing to wager money on that. I suppose that's a factor, but it's probably not the main factor.

I think the folks at Facebook and Google (and other similar companies) are just not able to imagine how these tools will be used. And to an extent I can understand this. Look it's hard enough to design software that is purely functional, e.g. a spreadsheet or a word-processing application. But it's another thing to try to anticipate how an online social networking matrix will evolve. The mistakes that the folks who run these companies are making seem pretty obvious to us now. So why weren't they obvious to the coders and project managers before the 'new services' were launched? Hmmmmm, I don't know. But can anyone say 'Aspergers syndrome'?

Hopefully, they'll learn how to get over it.

Superbowl SoundFX (Awesome stuff!)

If you enjoyed the Superbowl (i.e. you're a Saints fan), then you'll really enjoy these clips from the NFL. They're behind the scenes audio of all the action, including Sean Payton telling the NFL head of Referees that he's going to call on onside kick.  This link will take you to the 1st Quarter clip, but you can see the other 3 Quarters too at the same site (look around and you'll find them).

Do you know what it means?

TV people in far away places keep talking about "what this win means to the people of New Orleans.”  They have no idea. There is really no adequate description, but let's give it a shot. 

I was born and raised in New Orleans. I was 7 years old when Hurricane Betsy which struck the city. That's when they started building the levees that failed during Katrina. One year after the eye of Betsy passed directly over my house New Orleans was awarded a football franchise.

My dad got season tickets and he walked me and my brother over to Tulane Stadium, a few blocks from our house.  We saw John Gilliam run back the opening game kickoff for a touchdown, which gave us a huge dose of false hope (we finished 3-11 in the regular season).  A few years later at a halftime show there was a re-enactment of the Battle of New Orleans and a cannon misfired and blew off the hand of one of the soldiers who was packing the cannon.  It happened right in front of us and it was heart-wrenching. It wasn't the only gruesome sight that unfolded.

The Saints lost in every imaginable way, and so coach Tom Fears was fired.  One week later, under new management, Tom Dempsey kicked a 63 yard field goal to beat the Lions, and we celebrated as though we had won a playoff game.  Our hopes were again elevated, but we only won two games that season.  And we didn’t have a .500 year for the first ten years of the franchise.  We didn’t go to a playoff game until 1987, or twenty years after the franchise was first awarded to New Orleans.  Of course, we lost that game.  Whenever our hopes were raised they were inevitably cruelly dashed.

Inheriting the curse of the Saints

My son was born the year after the Saints' inaugural playoff game, and he inherited my obsession for the Saints.  He was also born with a hearing problem, which started becoming serious when he was about 5 years old. One day I decided to explain that having a handicap was nothing to worry about, using Tom Dempsey as an example.  I explained that Dempsey had a handicap, a deformed foot on his kicking leg.  He wore a special shoe, but he had overcome his handicap by kicking the longest field goal in NFL history.  My son remarked that his friend Shelby thought he was handicapped, but then said “but that’s just because I say what a lot.”  He didn't know what it meant to be handicapped which was amazing, but unfortunately he was also Saints fan (as our Ain'ts bag-wearing sportscaster Buddy Diliberto once said: "when you get to the Pearly Gates tell Saint Peter you're a Saints fan and he'll say 'come right in, cause whatever else you've done in life, you've suffered enough.'")

My next oldest child, Bridget, was not particularly into the Saints until they made the playoffs in 2000.  It was the fifth time the Saints had made the playoffs, but they had still never won a playoff game.  We were sitting in the end zone where the game changing play occurred that led to their first win.  People went nuts and started hugging each other, and Bridget became a full-fledged Saints fan.

An Ill-Wind Blows

Nothing much happened Saints-wise for five years, and then Katrina followed Betsy's path almost to a T, and wiped out the city.  Everyone was scattered and there was little concern about sporting events.  The Superdome had been devastated, and there wasn't much hope of re-opening it.  And so there wasn't much hope of keeping our beloved, but hapless, football team either.

I resigned myself to the idea that pro football was gone.  But somehow the Dome was reopened in 2006, and somehow the Saints beat the Falcons and went on to make it all the way to the NFL Championship game.  They lost to the Bears who went on to lose to the Colts.  That year was amazing, and it brought life back to a city that was living on a tattered shoestring of hope. This year is the culmination of the storm and football driven tragedies.  They say that the Superdome was built upon an Indian graveyard, but we were losing long before the Superdome was built.  However, this year is the year of real change. 

It’s been four years since Katrina and somehow we have amazing new leadership coming in.  The Saints made it to the Superbowl after being undefeated in their first 13 games.  It's amazing, but until the Superbowl issue was out of the way we still were not fully at peace.

Back in the regular season some people were worried that the number 13 was going to be our bad luck (sure enough we lost the next three games).  When the Saints lost to the Cowboys, everyone I know started questioning if they had improperly deviated from a ritual and caused the Saints to lose.  Everywhere we looked for signs.

It’s weird and it makes no sense, but people here in New Orleans felt personally responsible for the Saints’ success.  And their failure.  The Saints and its fans are inextricably intertwined.  That bond has been forged over 40 years, and its depth cannot be comprehended by anyone who has not lived here and experienced the ups and downs (mostly downs).

Superbowl of Salvation

To have the Saints rise out of the ashes of Katrina and go on to win the Superbowl is incomprehensible.  To win against Peyton Manning, a hometown hero and formidable opponent, is outlandishly strange.  Nothing about this rise would should make any sense.  And yet, to those of us who live here and who would have had no reason to believe we could do this, it somehow makes perfect sense.  Not in an intellectual way.  It really only makes sense if you look at it with your heart.  Preferably a heart that has been broken many times.

New Orleans isn’t a place you can understand until it sneaks up on you and gets into your skin.  Once that happens there is no cure other than complete salvation.  And that's what has happened.  So, how does that answer the question I posed at the beginning?  I don't know.

I guess I don’t really know how to describe what this Saints win means to our city, at least not to someone who hasn't been here.  Maybe it’s better to say it in a really shorthand way: whatever Katrina made us feel like, the Superbowl win is the exact opposite of that.  

Epilogue

Here's a picture of my kids taken about 3 years before the Saints won their first playoff game.  They were young and innocent when the picture was taken; they've suffered a lot since then, especially in the last four years.  But they understand the suffering was useful, and they've learned a lot.  They're all completely rabid Saints fans (even Charlotte).  Other kids are part of the new generation of Saints fans, like these young cuties, and these girls too.

  

Finally,  here's a little slideshow of things I experienced in the past few weeks on the way to Salvation. Hope you enjoy it, and I hope you find the all of the joy that we here in New Orleans have found.  If not, come visit us and we'll be happy to share.

Our problem is we don't listen (and many of us don't really want to)

If you want to disturb someone, and provoke a highly irrational reaction, challenge one of their deeply held assumptions.  Galileo discovered this, shortly after he started adovocating the Copernican notion that the Sun was the center of the Solar System, not the Earth.

I thought about this as I read this article in the New York Times today, which is about a scientist who studied trauma and then wrote a book about it called 'The Trauma Myth.'  Susan Clancy set about to study victims of traumatic child abuse and expected to find one thing, but then discovered something else that surprised her.  She set about trying to explain what she found, but instead of having people listen to her findings and think about them, she found that many (if not most) people were violently opposed to her findings.  Many people wound up accusing her being a friend of pedophiles.

Of course, if people had listened to what she was saying they would have been in a better position to actually help people who suffered traumatic abuse.  But what people say they're doing, and what they actually do are two very different things.  People say they're listening, but they're really just monitoring for code words, and then when they hear them their assumptions kick in and they react.  

If we knew how to listen to other people, then many silly disagreements would go away. Because if we listened better we'd realize that in many cases we don't disagree.  But, as long as we live in a world where people with limited information demonize scientists who gather extensive information under rigorous conditions, we will continue to have these pointless discussions.  

I have a new term for these reactionary responses: "viewpoint spam."  It's similar to, but more insidious than, marketing spam.  'Viewpoint spam' is propagated by those who blare ill-considered criticism, even if those to whom the criticism is directed have been thoughtful and rigorous in forming their views.

This attempted law is an example of the insanity I'm talking about.

Oh, and I won't be surprised if someone tries to leave a comment here harshly criticizing Ms. Clancy without even bothering to click on the NY times article link, much less read it.

iPad for Lawyers?

 The Apple iPad was announced today, which pretty much everyone expected.  The device is basically a large iPod Touch, except with some variances.  The iPad has a faster processor, and from what people who played with it report, it appears to be very speedy.  Also, it will have the ability to use 3G, so it can access the Internet from anywhere.  We won't be able to buy one for between 60 and 90 days (depending on if you want the 3G model or not).  Until it is released into the wild, it's hard to say what the real potential of this device is.  My question is: how might this device be of help to lawyers.

First, it will run all of the 140,000 applications that are currently available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. So that means that all of the legal applications that folks have been putting on those devices will now be usable on the iPad. But the screen is bigger, and that's a huge advantage for most of the legal apps because it will be easier to read the text of laws. The iPhone size is okay, but bigger would obviously better.

However, the iPad is not a laptop computer, so it doesn't boot up in the way that a laptop would.  If I grasp how it would work, the device will be instant on in the same way that an iPhone or iPod Touch comes on.  The battery life is supposedly about 10 hours, which we can presume is optimistic.  But even if it's about 7 hours it means that it's usable as a 'digital reference tool'.  And so a lawyer in court or at a hearing could certainly use it to quickly access information.  The simple form is more natural than a laptop, and therefore less obtrusive if used during a meeting or for quickly reading text.  Lawyers who simply want a device to access digital documents would, theoretically, have a strong interest in this device.

Still, we don't know enough yet to really say how lawyers could use this device beyond how they use their iPhones.  True, the iPad will be able to display PDFs (just as the iPhone does), but will it be able to manipulate PDFs?  Would you be able to create a signature on a document using this device?  There are ways to do this on the iPhone, but they're kind of clunky.  I'm pretty sure that lawyers would want to have more PDF functionality on a device like this than currently exists on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

True, there is a new developer SDK kit being released today and perhaps development for this device will create the possibility of applications that don't currently exist on the iPhone.  I would like to have the ability to annotate PDFs the way that I can on my computer.  I would also like to be able to use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.  The device has bluetooth capabilities, but the optional keyboard that Steve Jobs talked about was one that attaches physically to the iPad.  Does that mean the Apple bluetooth keyboard and (recently released) Magic Mouse won't work with the iPad?  We don't know, but I get the sense that they won't be compatible with the iPad. And that's a shame.

The iPad has a microphone, but I'm sure that it's not optimal for voice dictation.  Can you use third party microphones to get better quality audio in?  We don't know, and probably won't until after the device is on sale. 

I'm excited that this kind of product is being created by Apple, and I think the price point is decent.  I'm just not sure if it will fulfill all my hopes of what a medium sized tablet device could be.  Of course, this is the first iteration and we can certainly expect it to become more powerful over time.  I'm glad that Apple finally took an important step in filling this void.  One reason for the success of the iPhone is the many applications that are available.  But not everyone wants to use an iPhone or be tied to AT&T. Presumably many of those people would find the iPad appealing as a way to get access to the many applications, and also have the ability to surf the web via WiFi or 3G.

I'll almost certainly wind up buying one, mostly out of a strong desire to experiment with what I'm sure will wind up being a popular and useful digital tool.  There are several price options based on different storage capacity (16, 32, or 64 GBs) and based on whether 3G capability is included.  I will probably get the maximum storage capacity.  I don't know if I want the 3G capability.  I probably don't, but we'll see.

I'm not ready to proclaim this device a 'game changer.'  It seems pretty niche, but for lawyers I can see it as a very versatile tool.  If it has the PDF capabilities that I mentioned, that is.

Enlighten me, but make it quick!

Most speeches are too long, which is a shame because almost every speech has some useful information. So what if you created a program that lets people present a bunch of short talks?  

How short?  

5 minutes. Period.  No more, no less.  If you want to use Powerpoint, that's cool.  But, with this ironclad rule: 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. Period.  No more, no less.

This type of program is called 'Ignite,' and it was started in Seattle in 2006 by two geeks who wanted to create a highly charged speaking experience.  It worked big time.  And as a result 'Ignite' communities have started cropping up all over the world.  New Orleans now has an Ignite program (called IgniteNOLA), and the first event is scheduled for two weeks from now: Monday, February 1st from 8 to 10 pm (cocktail reception starts at 7pm, if you want to get there early).  

The speakers have all been selected, and so everything is set.  If you want to attend, it's free.  But you'll probably want to RSVP to assure yourself a spot at what is sure to be an lively and fascinating evening. The fun will take place at the Roosevelt Hotel (formerly known as 'The Fairmont') in downtown New Orleans.  So RSVP, and then be sure to tell your friends.  Trust me, this is not going to be like any other speaking event you've been to before.