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Herman and Lara are “AI lawyers,” the newest breed of specialists in the law. They work for AirHelp, a company that helps airline passengers resolve legal claims for refunds and damages from cancelled flights. Herman reviews travel claims, and Lara handles more complex cases. The thing is, they are robots. If that makes you nervous, relax. It’s not like you wanted their jobs anyway. AI Works The arrival of robot lawyers is a little scary, especially since they already can do 23 percent of a human lawyer’s work....

When we think of Nobel Prize winners, we tend to think of astrophysicists and chemists, poets and peacemakers, but rarely legal professionals. There is, after all, no Nobel Prize for law. But the legal industry got some special recognition from the Nobel committee yesterday, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom “for their contributions to contract theory.” That’s right, better contracts won the Nobel Prize....

Somewhere in rural Africa is a business woman who will never meet the people who helped launch her business – people like attorney Bruce Sewell. The retired general counsel serves on the board of Village Enterprise, which trains impoverished Africans to start their own businesses. He donated to the non-profit in the past because he couldn’t do the work himself. “Now, it’s time for me to roll up my sleeves and participate at the board level,” he said....

In a strange twist, the billing rates and legal fees from the Apple Samsung lawsuit seem to be making as many headlines as the underlying patents involved in the litigation. By some accounts, the lawyers involved in the lawsuit for both sides may have billed as much as half a billion dollars combined. And reports have it that a $1,200 an hour billing rate for top-flight patent attorneys is somewhat routine, reports Bloomberg....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. Before the explosion of online communications, our world necessarily was smaller and who we came in contact with tended to people we already knew. Then our ability to reach out and communicate with others expanded dramatically and exponentially as we all started traveling at warp speed down the information superhighway. We learned that not only could we interact with people locally, but with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks we could be communicating with people across the country and even in countries on the other side of the globe....

If you’re finally ready to hang your own shingle, there’s one thing you need to keep in mind: running a law firm means running a business. Even if you’re the sharpest legal mind in the state, you’re not going to survive if you don’t have any business smarts. So before you start out on your own, make sure you have a basic grasp on business fundamentals first. The law is a profession, of course, but running a solo firm is a business, too, and plenty of businesses disappear because of poor management....

A recent article in The New York Times Magazine discussed a University of Minnesota study that researched the effect of clean, versus messy, working environments. The study had two interesting findings: First, people who worked in organized, tidy environments were more likely to opt for healthier options. The second finding was more surprising; in spite of the broken windows theory, those who worked in messy environments came up with more creative solutions to problems....

The long-running dispute over Texas’s restrictive voter ID law took another turn last week, as the Department of Justice dropped one of its key objections to the law. The DOJ will no longer argue that the Texas law was enacted with discriminatory intent, the Department announced last Monday. Texas’s voter ID law, SB14, is one of the strictest in the country. After it was adopted in 2011, both the Department of Justice and civil rights groups sued, arguing that the law disenfranchised Texas voters, particularly poor and minority Texans....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet. The holiday season is upon us. We are scrambling to find gifts for our loved ones. Should those gifts be high-tech gadgets and devices? Well, there certainly are a wide array of such tech items to choose from. Indeed, in recent years, like others, I have bestowed televisions, desktops, laptops, smart phones, and music players upon my wife and kids....

Restaurant in ruins? Bed-and-breakfast going bankrupt? Gordon Ramsay to the rescue! But what would the world-famous, foul-mouthed chef have to say about failing law firms? “Your billing is bollocks!” “Your filing system is a f—ing mess!” “Don’t do that at a deposition, you donkey!” Ramsay’s restaurant-makeover show “Kitchen Nightmares” gets millions of viewers on Fox. While the oft-sarcastic Scotsman has yet to tackle law firms, we can only imagine how he’d react to what’s not working at a legal workplace....

When the legendary Babe Ruth stepped to the plate, crowds cheered and feared as they waited for his next home run. He hit 60 in 1927, a record that stood for 34 years. About a century later, the world’s biggest internet companies are stepping up to the plate on net neutrality. The Internet Association has filed to intervene in a lawsuit against the government’s repeal of open-internet regulations. The Wind Up The Federal Communications Commission started it in December, when the panel voted 3-2 to repeal protections against internet service providers throttling and blocking internet services....

When Flint, Michigan’s emergency manager switched the city’s water supply from Detroit to the Flint River, he saved about $5 million dollars, but also exposed thousands of residents to lead and other contaminants. Lead exposure, even in the smallest amounts, can impair a child’s brain function for life. It took Flint’s residents more than a year to gain the attention of state authorities, and the nation, but now that they have, the lawsuits and investigations are starting to roll in....

In a dispute between an artist and a museum over the implementation and installation of a football-field sized artwork, judgment of the district court in favor of the museum is affirmed in part, vacated in part and remanded where: 1) the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) applies to unfinished works, and as such, genuine issues of material fact forecloses summary judgment on one of the artist’s VARA claims - that the museum violated his right of artistic integrity by modifying the installation; and 2) the artist asserted a viable claim under the Copyright Act that the museum violated his exclusive right to display his work publicly....

Even though it happened a little over five years, the Deepwater Horizon explosion is the gift that keeps on giving – to the environment, and to lawyers. This week’s saga involves three Mexican states – Veracruz, Tamaulipas, and Quintana Roo – that sued BP, Transocean, and the other usual suspects, over damages resulting from the subsequent oil spill. The Fifth Circuit affirmed denial of their claims for lack of a “proprietary interest....

The truest words spoken in the aftermath of the massive Snapchat hack of 4.6 million users’ data were, “I think Snapchat, if they haven’t already done so, are going to need to hire some really good lawyers.” Those words, spoken by Christoper Soghoian, a former privacy advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, are spot-on. The company’s CEO, Evan Spiegal, addressed the ruckus with a s*** happens-type of response, reports Valleywag, which should do little to quell the rage of angry users....

Newegg received vindication at the Federal Circuit last week when the court ruled that the case never should have been brought on appeal in the first place for want of jurisdiction, ArsTechnica reports. Newegg will receive $15,000 in legal fees from AdjustaCam in the ruling, about half of the cost of defending the appeal to the Federal Circuit. But that doesn’t even touch the $200,000 in legal fees already billed for the case at Texas District Level....

Judge Lucy Koh strikes again. Last year, we called her the “most powerful woman in Silicon Valley,” due to her status as the presiding judge over the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement trial. Since then, she’s upheld a class-action lawsuit against Google over its email scanning practices, and now, has upheld another class-action against Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel for unfair labor practices, reports Reuters. But, but, Google has free food, you say....

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has scaled back the reach of the congressional authority in the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). Friday, the appellate court issued an en banc ruling reversing Anthony Kebodeaux’s SORNA conviction for knowingly failing to update his sex offender registration after his intrastate change of residence. While the court found that SORNA sometimes exceeds congressional commerce power, it is a narrow ruling. Anthony Kebodeaux was sentenced in 1999 to 3 months in prison for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. The Federal Aviation Administration has announced in a press release that it has finalized its first operational rules for the use of small unmanned aircraft systems, otherwise more commonly known as drones. According to the FAA, these rules “work to harness new innovations safely, to spur job growth, advance critical scientific research and save lives....

The Virginia Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a new type of Yelp case. By now, we’re familiar with the defamation and the SLAPPs and the non-disparagement agreements and the not-technically-extortion-but-sounds-like-it. Well, Yelp v. Hadeed Carpet Cleaning is different. Hadeed Carpet Cleaning wanted to sue the authors of critical reviews posted about it on Yelp. This in itself isn’t new; businesses have been trying for years to use lawsuits to get critical reviews off Yelp, though it usually doesn’t work because the reviews are not only opinions, but because lawsuits can’t be used in states that have anti-SLAPP laws....