Should AI be declared a separate legal personality? Ask your motherboard
By Marcel Strigberger | August 14, 2025 Hey humans! Should AI be declared a separate legal personality? The Law Commission in the U.K. is studying the notion, noting that the thought is not far-fetched. This means the entity can be a “person” in the eyes of the law, such as corporations, sovereign states, etc., all capable of […]
BARE BONES BRIEFS: Smaller firms’ hourly rates outstripping Big Law | 87% settlement rate for mediations | Trump punishes immigration lawyers | Pension risk transfers down 60% | Rule of Law pledges growing slowly
HOURLY RATES NEAR RECORD RISE A Thomson Reuters study reveals that lawyers’ hourly rates in the US have soared by 7.4% in the last year. What’s surprising is that the growth for the profession as a whole considerably outstrips the 5.0-5.5% rise at top-100 US firms. While the number for the firms outside the top-100 […]
Law Firms Marching Obliviously into Oblivion
Photo by Akin Akdag at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | August 8, 2025 Back in the day, when law school cost very little and you could rent an apartment in Toronto for a reasonable amount, law firms hired newly qualified lawyers at modest salaries and gave them simple assignments. The firms also provided mentoring and training, so […]
Putting a contract out on contracts
By Marcel Strigberger | August 7, 2025 I do not like entering into contracts. The prospect of signing an agreement checks most of the boxes for a PTSD diagnosis. Mention the words “offer and acceptance”, and I quiver. I would say I have had these sentiments since I was 10 years old. Why, you ask? I have […]
Socrates v. the Republic of Greece and Olympus Bigpharm Ltd.
By Marcel Strigberber | July 16, 2025 Did Socrates really die after ingesting that hemlock? Huge evidence just surfaced that he survived. Check out Socrates v. the Republic of Greece and Olympus Bigpharm Ltd., a decision of the Ancient High Court of Southern Athens, recently discovered by anthropologist lawyers. OUZO J.: This is an action […]
How I Almost Failed Law School Taking Accounting 101
By Murray Gottheil | July 13, 2025 I did pretty well in law school. I studied all of the time, had no life, and got great marks. By my final year, I may have been just a little bit full of myself. When selecting my courses for my final year of law school, I needed one […]
Should we prosecute fraud against the mega-wealthy?
Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream. — Buttercup, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore Which gets me to Bill Pallot. I’m sure you’ve all heard of this guy. Vanity Fair called him “the world’s leading expert on the works of 18th-century France”. However, Paris Match recently branded him “the Bernie Madoff of art.” You see, Pallot and […]
Capitalism Run Amok in the Legal Profession
By Murray Gottheil | June 26, 2025 There were good things about the old days when law was primarily a profession, and lawyers joined law firms with a view to learning, working hard, and becoming partners. One of them was that law firms cared about their associates progressing, developing clients, and becoming self-sufficient. When we decided […]
Kramer v. Kramer?
By Marcel Strigberger | June 25, 2025 As spooky as AI is, at least it comes up with information. However, AI is known to do what it wants to do, and the information can get a bit off base. We are all familiar, for example, with Donoghue v. Stevenson. In this iconic 1932 case, the House of […]
Does “AI” stand for “Abandoned Intelligence”?
By Murray Gottheil | June 24, 2025 There is no shortage of talk about the importance of lawyers delegating legal work to other lawyers and paralegals. Despite that, I have always believed that lawyers should not delegate work that they do not know how to do themselves. I questioned how anyone can check the quality of […]