The massive debt problems in Dubai have led to complex efforts to restructure that debt, as well as the Emirate’s legal framework itself. So there are still many questions that counsel and creditors are waiting to get some answers to.
As Jack Bunker points out on Westlaw Business Currents in his post titled, “Trimming the Sails: Dubai Investors Lurch Into Uncharted Court Waters,” there are billions of dollars at stake and the legal and financial communities are watching very closely.
Bunker examines the tension in Dubai World and the risks within the context of litigation involving Dubai:
This analysis is no mere history survey in its look at Dubai World. Government-owned entities in Dubai still have tens of billions in debt coming due in the next few years. The skein of lines demarcating Dubai’s government and its many state-owned entities can be dizzying. Compounding this, the ad hoc juxtaposition of regulatory agencies, official decrees, Dubai law, Free Zone law and UAE federal law is no more easily negotiable than that of complex legal frameworks in the West.
You can read the full post on Westlaw Business Currents.
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
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With the launch of WestlawNext a week ago today at LegalTech New York in the books, you now have a chance to catch a free preview breakfast for WestlawNext that will be available in selected cities in the United States through mid-March.
The first one is this Wednesday in Los Angeles.
All the cities and dates are listed below:
Los Angeles - Wed. 2/10 – Hyatt Century Plaza (2025 Avenue of the Stars)
San Francisco – Thu. 2/11 – Hyatt Regency San Francisco (5 Embarcadero Center)
Phoenix – Fri. 2/12 – Arizona Biltmore (2400 E. Missouri Ave.)
New York City – Wed. 2/17 – Grand Hyatt New York (109 East 42nd St. at Grand Central Terminal)
Washington, D.C. – Thu. 2/18 – Grand Hyatt D.C. (1000 H St. NW)
Philadelphia – Fri. 2/19 – Hyatt Penn’s Landing (201 S. Columbus Blvd.)
Miami – Tue. 2/23 – Hyatt Miami (400 South East Second Ave.)
Atlanta – Wed. 2/24 – Hyatt Regency Atlanta (265 Peachtree St. NE)
Tampa – Thu. 2/25 – Hyatt Regency Tampa (211 N. Tampa St.)
Houston – Wed. 3/3 – Hyatt Regency Houston (1200 Louisiana St.)
Denver – Thu. 3/4 – Grand Hyatt Denver (1750 Welton St.)
Dallas – Fri. 3/5 – Hyatt Regency Dallas (300 Reunion Boulevard)
Boston - Tue. 3/9 – Hyatt Regency Boston (One Avenue de Lafayette)
Chicago – Wed. 3/10 – Hyatt Regency Chicago (151 E. Wacker Dr.)
Minneapolis – Thu. 3/11 – The Marquette Hotel Minneapolis (710 Marquette Ave.)
Click here to sign up for a breakfast preview near you. The cities and dates also are listed here.
For more information, visit www.westlawnext.com.
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
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We had a busy week here on Legal Current out at LegalTech New York. But so did many journalists, bloggers and analysts who covered the show for their respective Web sites and publications.
So, it makes sense to use this weekly look at law-related blog and news links to focus on some of the content created at and about LegalTech:
Bob Ambrogi – LawSites
Monica Bay – Law Technology News
John Bringardner – Law.com
Christy Burke – Legal IT
Adrian Dayton – Marketing Strategy and the Law
Sean Doherty – Law.com
Rick Georges – Futurelawyer
Ari Kaplan – Law.com’s Legal Technology Blog
The Orange Rag’s LegalQB blog via Inside Legal
The Posse List
Donna Seyle – Freelance Law Firm
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
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Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point and his newest book What the Dog Saw, headlined the closing LegalTech keynote on Wednesday. The session was titled “I3: The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition and Information,” and was sponsored by Thomson Reuters. Gladwell also has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1996.
Also speaking on the panel was Dr. Lisa Sanders, internist, columnist for The New York Times and author of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, and medical advisor to the Fox television series House. Sanders also is an assistant clinical professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and a clinician educator in Yale’s Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency program.
David Craig, chief strategy officer for Thomson Reuters, opened the discussion and moderated the event.
The ballroom at the New York Hilton was packed as Craig set the tone by describing the “tsunami of information” inundating professionals across the globe.
“Everyone here knows from personal experience how the amount of information has exploded in the last twenty years,” said Craig. “But not only are we creating more information, we are also storing and sharing it. Corporations and organizations are responsible for a third of this information – banking records, personal medical records, research reports, news. And the expectation is that there is an answer online for every question. Legal professionals ran two billion searches against the Westlaw databases in 2009. This was an increase of 45% percent from the year before.”
Gladwell reflected that it wasn’t the lack of information that left the United States unprepared for the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941 – the United States had broken the Japanese code; it was the U.S. military’s over-abundance of information that left it unable to “see the forest for the trees.”
As part of her comments, Sanders further defined the information explosion as she recreated how doctors bombard themselves with information to solve difficult problems. She described a real-life House experience as a medical team tried to diagnose a dying woman. Despite 20 pages of test results and information, the primary doctor still couldn’t determine why the patient was jaundiced and why her vital organs were shutting down. What saved the woman was a doctor who reviewed the results and stepped back from the information to look for the connections.
Gladwell remarked that intuition is rooted in the unconscious, “drawing from the reserves of knowledge,” he said. Unaided expert decision-making is fragile, easily infected by biases. Gladwell pointed to a Kasparov chess challenge in which both opponents used a computer throughout the match. Kasparov saw that the computer’s quick analysis of every possible move enabled these grandmasters to let their experience, creativity and knowledge come through.
Portions of the event will be available soon on video, here on Legal Current.
John Bringardner recaps the session here on Law.com and Jason Wilson offers up “Gladwell, Sanders & Craig: LTNY 2010 Last Keynote in Tweets” on his blog.
After the presentation, we asked Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, for her impressions of the discussion in this video clip:
Posted by Gretchen DeSutter in:
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I had the opportunity to attend LegalTech New York 2010 and, in addition to witnessing the launch of our new product WestlawNext, I have been attending some of the sessions at the conference.
Since so much of this show focuses on discovery, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that affect discovery (especially e-discovery) loom large here in New York during LegalTech.
As a principal attorney editor for West, my team in Rochester, New York handles a number of treatises and practice guides involving litigation and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (and e-discovery for that matter). So I attended the session titled Amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, outlining recent movements to overhaul the FRCP and the federal rulemaking process to deal with some of the issues and the soaring costs of litigation in federal courts. (more…)
Posted by Greg Bell in:
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So where does data leave off and intelligent information begin?
Rick King, chief technology officer for the Professional Division of Thomson Reuters, discussed just that at a gathering of chief information and chief technology officers at the CIO Forum, held in association with LegalTech New York.
“The core competency of Thomson Reuters Professional Division is integrating content and technology better than anyone, providing customers with Intelligent Information to create knowledge to act,” King told the group. “For example, we painstakingly extract data from opinions, briefs and other documents to create our authority files in Westlaw. This is important to bringing intelligence to our information, relating the previously unrelated, adding detail and lighting up pieces that were before in the dark.”
He went on to say that “Intelligent information begins with a deep understanding of how your customers work and how they use information. Then, the secret sauce is using the technology to really dissect the content – to mine all the data in your content sets, know what it is, map it to other data to deepen its context, and serve it up exactly when its needed.”
King talks about the role of technologists and the influence they can have in law firms and organizations in this video clip from the event:
Posted by Scott Augustin in:
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Thomson Reuters, Legal, President & CEO Peter Warwick offered his perspective on the company’s approach to the current economic reality in a panel discussion, “Adapting and Thriving in a Challenging Economy”, at the Minnesota Venture & Finance Conference.
The launch of WestlawNext brings a significant advancement in the way professional legal research is done.
Andrew F. Popper, a professor at American University, Washington College of Law, talks about his award-winning novel “Rediscovering Lone Pine.”
There is no such thing as a general constitutional privilege against self-incrimination, or a constitutional privilege against inadvertent self-incrimination or against stupid self-incrimination… Smith v. State, 974 A.2d 991 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 2009)
The principle that a court may not issue a personal judgment against a defendant over which it has no personal jurisdiction.
Source: Black’s Law Dictionary
Our recap of the Gladwell, Sanders & Craig keynote at LegalTech, with photos http://bit.ly/9x8EDx #ltny 4 days ago
