Category: Tech

Summer of CDA 230

Josh King

Since my last series of posts on this topic, there has been an epic surge of hot nonsense government proposals on CDA 230.

First up: Donald F. Trump’s executive order purporting to take social media companies to task for, well . . . see for yourself:

Don’s Executive Order in response to this injustice is performative nonsense (read Eric Goldman’s comprehensive overview for more detail), but it is passing strange how “conservatives” have suddenly embraced government control of private speech. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans actually understood how the First Amendment works. Citizens United, anyone? 

Attorney General Bill Barr dutifully followed this up with a set of “Recommendations for Section 230 Reform.” These include broadening takedown requirements, adding disclosures, narrowing CDA 230 immunity for takedown decisions, and specifying that CDA 230 immunity doesn’t apply to antitrust enforcement (I don’t know that anyone thought that it did, but whatever). If you are looking for conservative, small-government principles . . . you’re aren’t going to find them here.

Next up was the Bad Josh, the would-be “Product Manager for the Internet,” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. Hawley and his crowd of boob-baiting fellow Republican Senators (all of whom are smart enough to know better) introduced an absolute turd of a bill designed to undercut CDA 230. While it has the virtue of only applying to the largest social media sites (thanks for that, I guess), it also doesn’t appear to do anything other than create a cottage industry of nuisance lawsuits. On the bright side, that creates a nice contingency plan for me, should I decide on a late-career switch back to being a litigator.

Closely following Hawley’s offering was the bipartisan PACT Act, sponsored by Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz and South Dakota Senator John Thune. While this bill includes some generally-unobjectionable disclosure standards, it carves back CDA 230 immunity, creates a notice-and-takedown regime, and imposes some truly laughable requirements (like a live telephone call center to respond to inquiries about moderation decisions). 

Oh, and at the same time there’s ALSO the bipartisan, oh-so-self-righteously-named “EARN IT” Act which would, that’s right, make platforms earn their CDA 230 immunity by satisfying a federal commission that they are doing all they can to prevent online sexual exploitation of children. The devil is always in the details when it comes to “think of the children” legislation like this, but it’s a safe bet that putting the thick, sweaty thumb of government on site operations in such a manner doesn’t bode well for innovation or privacy.

All in all, it’s already been a VERY busy summer for CDA 230, and it isn’t even July yet. These proposals are driven by everything from legitimate concern over edge-case issues to frustration at the reach of the First Amendment to bad-faith posturing to find any sort of brickbat to take to “Big Tech.” 

But we must keep in mind that the simplicity of CDA 230 — a too-rare example of government regulation getting out of the way and providing breathing room for new technology — has been a massive factor in enabling the growth of the internet as we know it over the last 24 years. Just because a multiplicity of voices are calling for change doesn’t mean that change is necessary or wise.   

LegalTech Startup TikD Sues Florida Bar

Josh King1 Comment

So the same day I ponder the question of ethics opinions and antitrust, a lawsuit gets filed against the Florida Bar – alleging antitrust violations related to, in part, an advisory ethics opinion!

This will bear watching. The plaintiff in the case is “Tikd,” an innovative service that helps consumers get legal help – with highly predictable outcomes – when dealing with routine traffic tickets. And the lawyers for Tikd are Ray Abadin (who was President of the Florida Bar just a couple of years back) and Pete Kennedy, the Austin, TX antitrust lawyer who successfully represented LegalZoom and Zlien in various UPL fights with states bars.

The ethics opinion at issue apparently deals with both UPL and fee-splitting concerns with Tikd, and it’s not even clear the opinion even exists. But Tikd says its competitors are spreading the word that the opinion is out there, and the Bar isn’t disavowing it – or even meeting with Tikd to discuss the matter.

For the Florida Bar, this is yet another illustration of the problem with ethics opinions in areas involving competition and advertising. Bars are wired to give conservative advice, but what they really should be doing in these areas is not opining at all. Rather, they should flip the script and adopt a policy that affirmatively encourages innovation in the delivery of legal services, and only looks to enforce the Rules in reaction to evidence of public harm.

September Notes: Fee-splitting, burner devices, and more judicial “friends.”

Josh King

The Fight Over Judicial “Friends” Continues.  A Florida case highlighted in last month’s newsletter has been decided, with the outcome being that a Miami judge does not need to recuse herself merely because she is Facebook “friends” with counsel for one of the litigants. As the unanimous court of appeals decision notes, “the degree of intimacy among Facebook ‘friends’ varies greatly.” No kidding, right? As anyone who has used Facebook for more than a hot second knows, one’s “friends” can range from BFFs to people you haven’t seen or talked to in years. Absent further evidence of potential bias, a Facebook friendship between judges and counsel shouldn’t even be worthy of mention as grounds for recusal. Still, lawyers being lawyers, you can expect to keep hearing about this “issue” for quite some time.

Some States Look to Modernize Fee-Splitting Rules. Rule 5.4 of the ABA Model Rules prevents lawyers from splitting fees with non-lawyers. This rule is really a form of conflict prevention, designed – as the title of the rule itself notes – to preserve the professional independence of lawyers. But the Rule’s rigid language hasn’t aged well. Accepting credit cards for legal fees results in a technical violation of Rule 5.4 every time the credit card processor takes their 3% “split” of the fee. While this issue has been largely ignored, Bars are struggling with innovative new services and the growing adoption of performance-based marketing (in which advertisers pay per customer, rather than per-impression or per-click). But some states are starting to take action. North Carolina and Oregon are taking different approaches, but both have proposed amendments to their fee-splitting rules that should take effect before the end of 2017. These changes preserve the public-protective purpose of the rules while easing up on the rigid technical limitations.

Do Lawyers Need “Burner” Devices When Traveling Overseas? The ABA Journal profiles an interesting issue for jet-setting lawyers: protecting client files when returning from travel abroad. While foreign snooping and theft are the more obvious concerns, there’s also the fact that lawyers have no meaningful Fourth Amendment protection from search when re-entering the country. That’s enough to cause some law firms to require attorneys to use “burner” devices – laptops containing no client data – when traveling overseas. Is that something that all globe-trotting lawyers should emulate? After all, this is an edge case risk for the vast majority of lawyers. But taking some simple precautions when traveling – like putting all of your client data in the cloud – offers protection from both far-out risks like this one and the more likely hazard of device loss or compromise. For while tech never fails to create fascinating new issues to explore, paying attention to good old physical security remains a lawyer’s primary means of protecting client data.

Social Media News and Notes:

If you MUST travel overseas with client files, perhaps consider using an encrypted flash drive.

Nebraska becomes the 28th state to add “technological competence” to a lawyer’s ethical obligations.

Ohio Supreme Court justice takes to Facebook to blast Browns players for kneeling during national anthem.

The McDonalds of Law?

Josh King2 Comments

Late last year, I offered to a room full of attorneys that they should consider emulating McDonalds when it comes to delivering consumer legal services.

Yes, the response was underwhelming. But hear me out:

Think of restaurant dining and legal services as solutions to problems. Dining solves the problem of hunger and nutrition; legal services whatever our legal problem (or, perhaps, opportunity) might be.

When it comes to dining out, one option is McDonalds. It’s quick, predictable, calorie-dense, and cheap. And while the “quality” of the McDonalds dining experience from the subjective perspective of taste might be low, the “quality” from the objective perspective of food safety is on par with other restaurants (and probably higher than average).

Now, if you want a dining experience that is higher in a subjective quality like taste, novelty, or ambiance, you will choose something other than McDonalds. That experience will almost certainly cost more – perhaps orders of magnitude more – but you will make that choice knowingly and openly. And, critically, the restaurant you choose won’t be any different from McDonalds on the objective quality measure of food safety.

Now, on to legal services.

If you’re a consumer in need of legal services, you face a legal marketplace where 95+% of the providers are offering only Chez Panisse-levels of services. Fancy, full-scope, custom services. And let’s put aside for a moment how well they are delivering on that quality promise [too often, not well], and ask the harder question: do consumers of legal services really WANT only the option of dining at Chez Panisse? Or would many of them just rather have some of that fast-predictable-cheap McDonalds action?

We know the answer to this question already. In every other category of goods and services, consumers are used to trading off price for quality. And, predictably, most of them will choose the lower-cost / lower-quality option.

It’s not just McDonalds vs. Chez Panisse. Think staying at the Motel 6 vs. The Ritz. Flying Frontier vs. any other airline. Buying clothes at Old Navy vs. Nordstrom. The subjective quality differences scale all over the place.

And here’s the thing: it’s completely rational for consumers to make these choices based on their own needs and economic condition, as long as the most important measures of objective quality are reasonably similar. Which they are; a mix of marketplace dynamics and consumer protection regulations ensure that minimum levels of objective quality are met.

So knowing that consumers in every other category want the option of a quick, predictable, affordable experience, why don’t more lawyers offer it? One common reason I hear repeatedly is that every legal problem is different, and that lawyers need to provide a sterling level of diligence in order to meet their ethical obligations and avoid malpractice.

This is a bogus objection. McDonalds doesn’t offer a high degree of food safety because they custom-make and inspect every burger and order of fries; they do it because they’ve consciously built up the processes necessary to provide this quality at scale. And lawyers could also offer cheap-and-predictable legal services, at high objective quality, but in order to do so they would need to re-tool their processes to support it. But rather than so doing, too many lawyers continue to rely on handwork, hoping to entice the small “fine dining” segment of the legal market.

So a lot of what’s blocking the opening up of a much bigger segment of the legal services market is mix of inertia, aversion to change, and a lack of facility in business process design. I am far from having all of the answers to this, but if you’re planning on attending Lawyernomics 2017 this April in Las Vegas, my talk will be focused on exploring this opportunity in more detail. I hope to see you there.

Hyperbole and Confirmation Bias

Josh King

So the other day I saw this tweet from Melinda Gates:

melinda-gates-tweet

This struck me as an extraordinary claim. Not because I don’t believe that gender-blind applications might make a difference in tech job callback rates, but because of the claim that it makes a one thousand percent difference.

Some context: the first entities to experiment in a large way with gender-blind application screening were symphony orchestras (applicants would literally sit for their auditions behind a screen). This was at a time – the 1970’s and 1980’s – when the musical directors running symphonies were openly dismissive of female musicians.

The results? Blind screening increased the probability a woman would move past the initial interview by about 50%.

A  fifty percent increase in interview success is a massive change. It unambiguously shows the value of the change in screening procedure. And by extension, it reveals the biases that were previously holding talented female musicians back. It’s why such screenings are now the industry norm.

So what would a study that produced a result twenty times higher tell us? Keeping in mind that the symphony study covered a time period where there was far less equality? When symphony directors would proudly and openly express sentiments about the inferiority of women? And the 20x-higher study was presumably done in 2016, where companies compete in an ever-more-desperate race for tech talent?

I’ll tell you what it would tell us: that the tech industry, for all its veneer of respectability and progressiveness, is in fact led by a pack of misogynistic sociopaths, driven by the single-minded goal of preventing women from being hired.

That would be an extraordinary claim – and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. However, all that seems to be available here is the barest of summaries:

  • The study was done by a recruiting agency known as Speak with a Geek (“SWAG;” cute).
  •  SWAG says it presented a group of employers with 5,000 candidates, first with full identifying details and later in a gender-blinded fashion.
  • SWAG says that in the first instance, only 5% of those selected for interviews were women. Once gender-blinded, that number went up to 54%.

So that’s actually close to an eleven hundred percent increase. Boo, evil male tech leaders!

I strongly suspect, however, that one of three things is actually going on here:

  • The SWAG study was very poorly designed and/or implemented.
  • The summary of the SWAG study misinterprets the data.[ref]For example it would be far more plausible that gender-blinding improved the interview rate of an small cohort of female tech candidates by 54%. That could still be a very significant finding.[/ref]
  • The study is fabricated – either entirely, or by stitching together a few semi-coherent data points and anecdotes into an amalgamation that doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t know which; SWAG never responded to my request for more info on the study.

But why do I care about this?

First, as a male who has worked in tech for 20+ years – including a stint running HR and recruiting – I find the implication appalling that my cohorts and I comprise some sort of cabal working fiendishly to keep women out of our playground.

Second, seeing statistics batted around in a non-critical way really gets under my skin. We’ve all got our cognitive biases, and many of us have a tendency to embrace “data” that supports our positions without doing adequate diligence on whether that data is, in fact, remotely accurate. It’s a bummer to see Melinda Gates, who should know better, fall into this same trap.

Finally, there’s this: those of us working in tech know that the industry has gender issues. The number of women pursuing CS degrees has plummeted over the last generation (although there are signs this is turning around). The culture in some tech companies can feel less-than-welcoming for a lot of women. And there are surely biases against women, implicit or overt, that male hiring managers bring to the table.

But promoting hyperbolic garbage is wholly counterproductive. Tech is a data-driven business, with a lot of smart people working in it. It betrays a certain unseriousness to promote wild-ass claims with no substance to back them up. It keeps people from engaging. And it makes them not trust anything you say – even when it’s true. After all, if proponents of a particular point of view are cool with just making shit up, why should someone take them seriously?

So let’s be critical and always ask to see the data before accepting the conclusion – particularly when the claim is extreme.