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"AI is taking away intellectual donkey-work". A great point that Blindboy makes in his podcast episode "Artificial Intelligence is disgusting and it will never replace artists" His point being, if I may paraphrase, that when a creative worker is just starting out, before they are at the level where they can make a living with their art, they generally support themselves doing 'intellectual donkey-work'. Work that is not artistically challenging or interesting but which pays

"You can be a red-blooded capitalist and still worry about the political stability of an economy in which ever more output flows toward shareholders instead of employees." I've always considered myself a red blooded capitalist, and yes, I can see the worry. While I've been thinking about this for most of my career, I've been forced to think about it quite a bit more lately. The whole thing about capitalism is that you achieve wealth by owning stuff, not by doing stuff. There

This is a bit of a hot take but hear me out. I’m a bit of a nerd myself, and my career has been split between being in-house counsel, outside counsel and tech executive. During that time I’ve picked up a few programming languages and have actually built some pretty cool stuff. I’ve always felt there is a huge overlap between writing software and lawyering, especially writing contracts. Writing a contract is surprisingly similar to writing a computer program. You declare y

CBDR? But I’m a JD! CBDR is a maritime term, it stands for “Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range” and what it means is if you look at your radar and see another radar reflection that stays at a constant angle to you, but for which the distance between you and the target is shrinking, eventually you are going to collide. You really don’t need to know anything about the other vessel – it’s speed, direction, whether the captain is drunk or not – none of it matters, all that you ne

Have you ever been taking a medication for which alcoholic beverages are contraindicated and you go out to a restaurant on Friday night? So you and your lovely spouse go out for a nice dinner, but you both have allergies and have been taking antihistamines so you just order tap water with dinner. Observations: 1. It’s a mark of professionalism on the part of your server if they successfully avoid even giving a hint of disappointment in your beverage selection. Tip that pe

For decades, Big Law has clung to the billable hour like a life raft in a sea of inefficiency. Legal due diligence, especially in M&A, is still dominated by armies of junior associates combing through contracts manually, line by line, in a painfully slow and error-prone process. This isn’t legal expertise; it’s glorified data entry at $600 an hour. In an age where AI can surface key clauses in seconds, Big Law’s refusal to evolve isn’t tradition, it’s self-destruction on the