Author: TSA Press

Have you heard of Legal Geek? Maybe not. But they have been shaking up the European LegalTech scene since 2016 thanks to their now-legendary Legal Geek Conference in London. And on June 25th the U.S. legal tech sector will have the chance to see what all the fuss is about as Legal Geek is holding a North American edition for the very first time in Brooklyn, New York.

The event will bring together some of the most influential figures from the European and North American legal tech communities for one day only.

It’s a big deal because the Legal Geek approach to legal conferences has A LOT of fans in Europe. Legal Geek is different because they build their events solely around the experience of the delegate.

What does that look like? Well, for one, the conference will feature 40+ international kick-ass speakers, keeping to 8-minute speaker slots – TED Talk style – whom Legal Geek has encouraged to keep their content real.

This isn’t a conference for futurists.

This approach forces each speaker to deliver crystal-clear messages, which helps keep delegates engaged and asking for more. It also brings out people’s creative sides. At their 2017 London conference, for example, Kira Systems CEO Noah Waisberg brought an avocado and a toaster on stage to illustrate his talk. It’s the sort of an event that has even trended on Twitter.

Legal Geek’s ethos includes maxims such as “friends first, business after” and “come to learn and to teach.” It also encourages the legal community not to wear a tie – a small but significant act that helps build a relaxed atmosphere at the event and still facilitate dynamic discussions.

Moreover, the event only has three sponsors, all of whom add value: Thomson Reuters, Clifford Chance, and Tessian. As Legal Geek’s founder Jimmy Vestbirk says in this video promoting Legal Geek North America “this isn’t a trade show”:

To put a tagline on the event, it is designed for both technologists and lawyers (both in-house and private practice) to learn about what legal technology is out there and how (not why) it can help you right now.

If you want to find out more about the event, check out Legal Geek’s event page, and make sure you book your ticket here!

Above the Law is going and we encourage you to join us. You will definitely have your eyes opened to the legal tech scene on both sides of the Atlantic.

I’m all about working smarter, not harder, and if there’s one thing that’s accomplished with artificial intelligence generally, and machine learning program in particular, it’s that they produce smart output or results. Think about it — thanks to technology assisted review platforms, we can parse millions of documents and save tons of time and money in document review rather than have lawyers billing by the hour put eyes on every document.

There are many other applications for machine learning technologies. They are used in email and spam filtering, to identify malware and phishing expeditions, to categorize enterprise-wide content, and even to diagnose serious illness. The possibilities are endless, frankly.

So, when I saw enterprising companies taking a look at potentially predicting the outcomes of court proceedings, I kind of perked up and paid attention.

Suppose you could collect and analyze the data for U.S. judges’ court rulings — most of which are all public — and then use that data to successfully predict how the courts or an individual might rule on a given issue. Insight like this, even if it only revealed general tendencies, could impact the actions of litigants and their attorneys.

Well, of course this technology already exists in the U.S. and elsewhere and people in the legal business have been using this data to assess the outcome of legal proceedings.

But France has apparently made this illegal.

The French Code of Administrative Justice, recently amended by the Article 33 of the Justice Reform Act, prohibits the use of a judge’s name “for the purpose or effect of evaluating, analyzing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices.” A violation of this law is punishable by up to five years in prison and possibly other sanctions.

What?!

Court decisions in France are available to the public free of charge and in electronic format. They typically remove the parties’ names from the decisions, but why would French lawmakers prohibit the analysis of judges’ decisions? Is this not public information?

Your guess is as good as mine, but it seems odd to say the least. Putting aside potential privacy issues which presumably apply to the private parties under the GDPR, it seems to me that judges, for all of their independence and fair-mindedness, are part of the government. And if your goal is to be more transparent and grant citizens greater access to government and court information, you don’t prohibit the analysis of that information.

The real irony here is that this all comes amidst the French president’s push for greater use of AI. Last year, President Macron gave several speeches and interviews in which he proclaimed France would lead the charge on the use of artificial intelligence, and he even pledged nearly $2 billion to do it.

Legal technology companies working on products that perform these functions should be careful not to run afoul of the new French law. Then again, if you’re not in France and subject to French court jurisdiction, it’s not at all clear that France could do anything about it anyway.

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Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.

It is very easy to fall for the temptation to blame the victims.

Law school was insanely expensive. I have colleagues who came out of law school with a quarter-million dollars in educational debt. Every year that I’ve been a public defender, I have taken on more cases than I had the year before. … I had 531 new cases last year, which is 131 more than the ABA recommends. Most of us don’t think seriously about things like buying houses. Most of us don’t think seriously about things like getting married or having kids. This is not a job so much as a calling. And that has impacts. It makes it really hard to keep people who get experienced, who developed the best chops, who have the best skills.

This job will kill you if you let it. It’ll turn into the only thing that you do if you don’t draw hard boundaries around it.

— Charlie Peirson, a public defender in Portland, explaining why he and more than a dozen of his colleagues were forced to walk off the job in protest. Peirson, who says he’s “lucky” because he only has about $100,000 in student loans, makes only $60,000 a year and is protesting to draw attention to Oregon House Bill 3145. The bill would cap the number of cases that can be assigned to public defenders and require additional training for new lawyers.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Zimbabwe may consider withdrawing from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species because the organization won’t allow it to sell its ivory stockpile.

The southern African nation with the world second-largest population of elephants has a stockpile of tusks worth an estimated $300 million and needs the revenue, Fulton Mangwanya, director-general of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, told lawmakers in the capital, Harare on Monday.

While CITES has banned international ivory sales to curb poaching, frustration is growing over the fact that “other countries are prescribing how we should handle our animals,” Mangwanya told a parliamentary committee on environment and tourism. Withdrawing from CITES would have the support of neighbors Botswana, Zambia and Namibia, which all have large elephant populations of their own, he said.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has raised money for conservation by selling elephants to China. The size of the population, estimated at 84,000, is twice what can be supported by available food and land, according to the government. Botswana last month lifted a hunting ban on wildlife because it says it has too many elephants, which destroy crops and sometimes kill people.

The last once-off commercial sale of stockpiles of elephant ivory from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe that CITES allowed was completed in 2009. Most of the tusks went to China and Japan.

“Countries like Japan are supporting us, China is dilly-dallying, I’m not quite sure why, but they are the ones that want our ivory,” Mangwanya said.

Zimbabwe still plans to engage with SA power utility Eskom in an effort to boost electricity imports despite the board of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa) being fired last week for ‘incompetence’.

Zesa is the holding company of electricity distributor ZETDC and electricity generator ZPC.

Zimbabwe started implementing load shedding in mid-May due to a combination of low water levels at Kariba Dam’s hydroelectric power plant, generation constraints at ageing power stations and limited foreign imports. In late May, Zimbabwe Energy Minister Fortune Chasi told Parliament Kariba could be forced to stop production within 14 weeks as a result of falling water levels.

The country wants to boost imports from South Africa which have been curtailed due to non-payment. But to do so it will need to first work out a payment plan for the estimated $33m it owes the SA power utility.

Chasi said board changes at Zesa will not stop plans to engage with Eskom.  “We still have an executive, there is a team that will go ahead and engage Eskom.”

He said a team was supposed to have gone to South Africa last week but had to delay following ministerial changes in SA’s government. In late May President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the ministries of Energy and Mineral Resources would be merged, with Gwede Mantashe at the helm.

Payment Plan

Chasi said the team has been instructed to negotiate a payment plan. Once a agreement had been reached, Zimbabwe hopes Eskom will boost exports to Zimbabwe by up to 400MW per day.

The supplies will be during off-peak periods and will allow Zimbabwe to shut off and conserve water at Kariba Dam.

Post published in: Business

Zimbabwe has been going through a crippling power crisis that claimed the former minister of energy Joram Gumbo who was last month reassigned and replaced by Minister Fortune Chasi.

Chasi is however not taking chances and has fired the board.

He said the decision followed a review of the board’s minutes which did not convince him that the board had the capacity to resolve the crisis.

“Upon reviewing the minutes of the board, I was convinced that it was in the national interest that I take the action I took,” said Chasi.

Load shedding

Zimbabwe announced last month that it had started to implement load shedding due to low water levels at its Kariba Dam power plant.

The dam, on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, is only 34% full and cannot generate electricity at optimal capacity. The country was also facing generation constraints at Hwange Power Station, with limited imports from Eskom in South Africa and from Mozambique.

Eskom is facing woes of its own, including crippling debt and poorly maintained power stations.

Post published in: Business

A State which perpetrates violence on men and women who stayed behind to serve the education system even when most teachers were leaving the country is shameless and ungrateful.
All they demand and rightfully so, is a living wage indexed in US dollars, better working conditions, reasonable teacher-student ratio and suitable facilities for the learners.
That is not criminal.

Masaraure has committed no crime, he is a patriot who is demanding better public delivery of education services.

It is clear that he is being targeted for his dissenting views.

In January, he was thrown in the supermax state penitentiary with robbers and rapists. Now armed bandits are sent to his house petrifying his family, torturing him, striping him naked and leaving him for dead.

The dark days are still with us that even signs of goodwill from the EU are being washed down the drain by reckless and ruthless behavior.

The MDC demands an end to the terrorising of CSO and Union leaders.

Those in prison must be given back their freedom unconditionally and those who attacked Masaraure must be brought to Justice.

MDC: Defining A New Course for Zimbabwe!

Jacob Mafume
MDC National Spokesperson

Post published in: Featured

The southern African nation in February removed an unrealistic peg for its electronic dollars and surrogate bond notes and merged them into a transitional currency called the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollar.

The unit, which started trading at 2.5 to the dollar on the official interbank market when it was introduced on Feb. 22, was pegged at 5.9 on Friday, bringing its devaluation to 57.6 % to date. The currency has devalued by 49.4 % on the black market during the same time.

Most businesses are now pegging their prices in U.S. dollars and use black market rates to calculate RTGS dollar prices.

“As a country we must have our currency by the end of this year, we have started that journey,” Mnangagwa said at a gathering south of the capital Harare.

Prices of basic goods from sugar to maize meal have spiked in the last month as the RTGS dollar has lost value.

Mnangagwa said price hikes were unjustified.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said in January that Zimbabwe, in the grip of a severe dollar crunch that has caused shortages of fuel and medicines, would have a new currency in the next 12 months.

Zimbabwe abandoned its own currency in 2009 after it was wrecked by hyperinflation and adopted the greenback and other currencies, such as sterling and the South African rand.

As physical dollar supplies started dwindling, the central bank introduced the bond note in 2016 at par to the dollar while the amount of electronic dollars increased, plunging the financial system into disarray.

Post published in: Featured