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Do you ever wonder why some gifted small children play Mozart, but you never see any child prodigy lawyers who can draft a complicated will?

The reason is that the rules of how to play the piano have far fewer permutations and judgment calls than deciding what should go into a will. “Do this, not that” works well with a limited number of keys in each octave. But the permutations of a will are infinite. And by the way, child prodigies can play the notes, but usually not as soulfully as an older pianist with more experience of the range of emotions an adult experiences over a lifetime.

You get to be good at something by doing a lot of it. You can play the Mozart over and over, but how do you know what other human beings may need in a will, covering events that have yet to happen?

Not by drafting the same kind of will over and over, that’s for sure.

Reviewing a lot of translations done by people is the way Google Translate can manage rudimentary translations in a split second. Reviewing a thousand decisions made in document discovery and learning from mistakes picked out by a person is the way e-discovery software looks smarter the longer you use it.

But you would never translate a complex, nuanced document with Google Translate, and you sure wouldn’t produce documents without having a partner look it all over.

The craziness that can result from the mindless following of rules is an issue on the forefront law today, as we debate how much we should rely on artificial intelligence.

Who should bear the cost if AI makes a decision that damages a client? The designers of the software? The lawyers who use it? Or will malpractice insurance evolve enough to spread the risk around so that clients pay in advance in the form of a slightly higher price to offset the premium paid by the lawyer?

Whatever we decide, my view is that human oversite of computer activity is something society will need far into the future. The Mozart line above was given to me by my property professor in law school and appeared in the preface of my book, The Art of Fact Investigation.

The Mozart line is appropriate when thinking about computers, too. And in visual art, I increasingly see parallels between the way artists and lawyers struggle to get at what is true and what is an outcome we find desirable. Take the recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum here in New York, called Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950 to 1980.

It showed that our struggle with machines is hardly new, even though it would seem so with the flood of scary stories about AI and “The Singularity” that we get daily. The show was filled with the worrying of artists 50 and 60 years ago about what machines would do to the way we see the world, find facts, and how we remain rational. It seems funny to say that: computers seem to be ultra-rational in their production of purely logical “thinking.”

But what seems to be a sensible or logical premise doesn’t mean that you’ll end up with logical conclusions. On a very early AI level, consider the databases we use today that were the wonders of the world 20 years ago. LexisNexis or Westlaw are hugely powerful tools, but what if you don’t supervise them? If I put my name into Westlaw, it thinks I still live in the home I sold in 2011. All other reasoning Westlaw produces based on that “fact” will be wrong. Noise complaints brought against the residents there have nothing to do with me. A newspaper story about disorderly conduct resulting in many police visits to the home two years ago are also irrelevant when talking about me.[1]

The idea of suppositions running amok came home when I looked at a sculpture last month by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) called 13/3. At first glance, this sculpture would seem to have little relationship to delirium. It sounds from the outset like a simple idea: a 13×13 grid from which three towers arise. What you get when it’s logically put into action is a disorienting building that few would want to occupy.

As the curators commented, LeWitt “did not consider his otherwise systematic work rational. Indeed, he aimed to ‘break out of the whole idea of rationality.’ ‘In a logical sequence,’ LeWitt wrote, in which a predetermined algorithm, not the artist, dictates the work of art, ‘you don’t think about it. It is a way of not thinking. It is irrational.’”

Another wonderful work in the show, Howardena Pindell’s Untitled #2, makes fun of the faith we sometimes have in what superficially looks to be the product of machine-driven logic. A vast array of numbered dots sits uneasily atop a grid, and at first, the dots appear to be the product of an algorithm. In the end, they “amount to nothing but diagrammatic babble.”

Setting a formula in motion is not deep thinking. The thinking comes in deciding whether the vast amount of information we’re processing results in something we like, want or need. Lawyers would do well to remember that.

[1] Imaginary stuff: while Westlaw does say I live there, the problems at the home are made up for illustrative purposes.

Anyone following artificial intelligence in law knows that its first great cost saving has been in the area of document discovery. Machines can sort through duplicates so that associates don’t have to read the same document seven times, and they can string together thousands of emails to put together a quick-to-read series of a dozen email chains. More sophisticated programs evolve their ability with the help of human input.

Law firms are already saving their clients millions in adopting the technology. It’s bad news for the lawyers who used to earn their livings doing extremely boring document review, but good for everyone else. As in the grocery, book, taxi and hotel businesses, the march of technology is inevitable.

Other advances in law have come with search engines such as Lexmachina, which searches through a small number of databases to predict the outcome of patent cases. Other AI products that have scanned all U.S. Supreme Court decisions do a better job than people in predicting how the court will decide a particular case, based on briefs submitted in a live matter and the judges deciding the case.

When we think about our work gathering facts, we know that most searching is done not in a closed, limited environment. We don’t look through a “mere” four million documents as in a complex discovery or the trivial (for a computer) collection of U.S. Supreme Court cases. Our work is done when the entire world is the possible location of the search.

A person who seldom leaves New York may have a Nevada company with assets in Texas, Bermuda or Russia.

Until all court records in the U.S. are scanned and subject to optical character recognition, artificial intelligence won’t be able to do our job for us in looking over litigation that pertains to a person we are examining.

That day will surely come for U.S records, and may be here in 10 years, but it is not here yet. For the rest of the world, the wait will be longer.

Make no mistake: computers are essential to our business. Still, one set of databases including Westlaw and Lexis Nexis that we often use to begin a case are not as easy to use as Lexmachina or other closed systems, because they rely on abstracts of documents as opposed to the documents themselves.

They are frequently wrong about individual information, mix up different individuals with the same name, and often have outdated material. My profile on one of them, for instance, includes my company but a home phone number I haven’t used in eight years. My current home number is absent. Other databases get my phone number right, but not my company.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “Kayak” type system that could compare a person’s profile on five or six paid databases, and then sort out the gold from the garbage?

It would, but it might not happen so soon, and not just because of the open-universe problem.

Even assuming these databases could look to all documents, two other problems arise:

  1. They are on incompatible platforms. Integrating them would be a programming problem.
  2. More importantly, they are paid products, whereas Kayak searches free travel and airline sites. In addition, they require licenses to use, and the amount of data you can get is regulated by one of several permissible uses the user must enter to gain access to the data. A system integration of the sites would mean the integrator would have to vet the user for each system and process payment if it’s a pay-per-use platform.

These are hardly insurmountable problems, but they do help illustrate why, with AI marching relentlessly toward the law firm, certain areas of practice will succumb to more automation faster than others.

What will be insurmountable for AI is this: you cannot ask computers to examine what is not written down, and much of the most interesting information about people resides not on paper but in their minds and the minds of those who know them.

The next installment of this series on AI will consider how AI could still work to help us toward the right people to interview.

One lawyer we know has a stock answer when clients ask him how good their case is: “I don’t know. The courts are the most lawless place in America.”

What he means is that even though the law is supposed to foster predictability so that we will know how to act without breaking our society’s civil and criminal rules, there is a wide variety of opinion among judges even in the same jurisdictions about the matters that make or break a case on its way to a jury.

Our friend’s answer came to mind while reading an interesting roundup of experienced trial lawyers over the weekend about why the trial of Bill Cosby outside Philadelphia resulted in a deadlocked jury and mistrial, announced on Saturday.

In the New York Times, the attorneys mostly fell into two camps: those who thought lead witness Andrea Constand presented the jury with credibility problems because of inconsistent testimony, and those who thought the judge’s decision to limit the admission of evidence of many other similar allegations substantially weakened the prosecution’s case.

My view is that the two reasons are linked: evidence that many women have made claims similar to Constands’ could easily have overcome the credibility problem if the jury had been able to hear about many of the other women who alleged Cosby had drugged and had sexual contact with them too.

In another case with identical facts and a different judge, the other accusers may have made it in — a great example of two things we tell clients all the time:

  1. Persuasive evidence is good, but admissible evidence is what you really want when you know you’re going to trial.
  2. A lot of legal jobs are now being done by computers, but while there are human judges they will differ the way humans always do: in a way that is never 100% predictable.

Admissibility

When we are assigned to gather facts in civil or criminal matters, all of the evidence we get must always be gathered legally and ethically. Otherwise it could easily turn out to be inadmissible. But even if you do everything right, admissibility is sometimes out of your control. The whole case can turn on it.

If all you are doing is trying to get as much information as you can without any thought of taking it to trial, then admissibility may not be much of a concern. Think about deciding whether someone is rich enough to bother suing using hearsay evidence; or finding personally damaging information that may be excluded as prejudicial, but even the thought of arguing a motion about that information would be too much for the other side to bear. It could increase the chance of a more favorable settlement for you.

In the Cosby case the information in question would have been very helpful to the prosecution.

Ordinarily the justice system doesn’t like to see evidence of other bad acts used in a case to paint a picture of  a defendant’s character. Rule 404 (b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence excludes this kind of thing, but allows admission of evidence of another act “as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.”

So the prosecution could have argued that all the other accusers making similar claims that they were drugged and subjected to sexual contact were evidence of Cosby’s intent, or a lack of accident, and may even have been seen as preparation for the time Constand went to Cosby’s home and was drugged.

But the judge wouldn’t let any of that in. In Pennsylvania, the rules in this section are tougher on the prosecution than are the federal rules. The state’s rule 404(b) (2) “requires that the probative value of the evidence must outweigh its potential for prejudice. When weighing the potential for prejudice of evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts, the trial court may consider whether and how much such potential for prejudice can be reduced by cautionary instructions.”

It seems that the judge was afraid that even warning the jury not to read too much into the other accusers would have prejudiced them even if he instructed them that the other accusers alone did not constitute proof of Cosby’s guilt — in this matter with Constand.

Unpredictability

The legal world is justifiably occupied in trying to figure out how to reduce costs by automating as many tasks as possible. Gathering of some facts can be automated, but not always, for the simple reason that facts are infinitely variable and therefore not wholly predictable.

Implicit in fact gathering is evaluating the facts you get, as you gather them. You are constantly evaluating because you can’t look everywhere, so promising leads get follow-up, the others don’t. Machines can scan millions of documents using optical character recognition because there are only so many combinations of letters out there. But the variety of human experience is limitless.

If machines can’t be trusted to properly evaluate someone’s story, imagine the problems if that story has never been written down. Think about all the things you would not want the world to know about you. How much of all of that has been written down? Probably very little. It was human effort alone that developed the other witnesses the prosecution wanted to call.

The only way a computer might have helped in this case would have been to predict – based on prior cases – which way the judge would rule in excluding the other evidence. Even that would be a tough program to write because these decisions turn on so many unique factors. But since judges are chosen at random, it wouldn’t have helped shape the decision about whether or not to charge Cosby.

Want to know more about our firm?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, this one and The Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.
  • If you are member of the ABA’s Litigation Section, see my piece in the current issue of Litigation Journal, “Five Questions Litigators Should Ask: Before Hiring an Investigator (and Five Tips to Investigate It Yourself).

Another EB-5 visa fraud, more burned investors. For people outside the United States trying to pick a reputable investment that will get them permanent residency in the U.S., sorting through hundreds of projects is often the hardest part of the job.

EB-5 due diligence

There is plenty written about what you should do before you invest, one of the latest guides being from the North American Securities Administrators Association, here. You can read up on EB-5 frauds here.

What are the warning signs of fraud? Last year’s revelation of a huge fraud at a Vermont development that had sucked in hundreds of investors led many to wonder, “How could we have known this would blow up?”

There is no guaranteed way to find fraud, but if you see things that would give a prudent investor pause; if the project’s sponsors don’t have a good track record; if you don’t understand the risks of the project (and they all have risks) walk away.

Remember, many reputable immigration lawyers refuse to recommend an EB-5 investment because they don’t want to be sued if the investment encounters problems, whether of a normal business variety or because of fraud. Even if your lawyer recommends an investment, you should still perform due diligence on the project.

Even more surprising to some non-Americans, once the government spots EB-5 fraud, it’s often too late for the investors who have put in their money. Sometimes investors can recover and sometimes not, but the green cards they wanted will not be delivered and they have lost time in addition to money.

Looking at the track record of a developer is much easier than going through the hundreds of pages of documents you and your lawyer will need to examine before you invest your money. You will always need to do both, but as you sort through five or ten possible investments, start with the track records.

The Vermont Fraud Warning Signs

One of the most celebrated of all the projects was the group of investments in the northeastern state of Vermont, near the border with Canada. Jay Peak was an old ski hill that fell into the hands of a Canadian operating company. They began with the EB-5 program by raising money for one project, but then in 2008 the Canadian company sold the business to a man local press described as “mysterious,” Ariel Quiros. He grew up in New York, was of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan background, but had spent years in Korea building unspecified businesses which supposedly gave him the ability to buy Jay Peak for $25 million.

Once Quiros bought the mountain, the EB-5 projects accelerated, with six more projects for hotels and finally, before the scheme was exposed, a bio-technology park that was supposed to flourish among the ski hills and dairy farms of far-northern Vermont.

The main thing an investor should have asked about Jay Peak was, who exactly is Ariel Quiros, the owner? The whole sickening unravelling of the investment project is available at vtdigger.org (going from most recent to oldest story). But anyone investing after January 14, 2014 would have had an easy way to throw this one in the waste basket. A Vermont Digger article available on line described Quiros’ track record this way:

  • He lost his seat on the board of Bioheart Inc. after AnC Bio [Quiros’ company] failed to make the second installment in a $4 million investment.
  • Quiros also survived a Texas lawsuit in which two investors alleged breach of contract after they didn’t get their money back in full in 10 years.
  • And a Florida man claims he never received almost $16,000 worth of equipment from a [Quiros] company called Q Vision, but he appears to have dropped his pursuit of the matter.

Of course, full due diligence could involve verifying the assertions in this article, but if they turned out to be true, who would entrust half a million dollars and a green card to someone with a track record of not following through on investments and unhappy investors alleging breach of contract?

If Quiros occasionally had disputes with investors and partners, you would also ask a more basic question: how did he make his money – the money that bought Jay Peak — in the first place?

The article in January 2014 said,

“Quiros has melded street smarts from New York, military sensibilities from the Korean Demilitarized Zone and a love of adventure into a business empire that spans the globe, starting with international trade from Korea in the early 1980s… GSI Group, where he got his start in Korea, imported and exported goods ranging from shoes to women’s blouses to radios…He specialized in raw materials, much of it for the Korean government, he says.”

In addition, Bloomberg says that “Mr. Quiros serves as a Director and Principal of GSI Group, a raw materials procurement company for the South Korean manufacturing community with offices in Seoul, Beijing, Sydney, Hong Kong and Miami.”

The only problem is, GSI is one difficult company to find. Quiros shows up on open-source databases as a corporate officer of 96 companies, but these are all in Florida, Panama and Vermont. None of the Florida companies are called GSI.

On line, there is www.GSIkoreanet., but this mentions no overseas offices. GSI Australia’s website says it is a company dealing in poultry, swine and grain. There are no Korean links evident. And it is based in Queensland and Victoria, not New South Wales where Sydney is. The Australia companies registry provides no evidence of any Korean trading company registered in New South Wales.

In Hong Kong, a search of directors of all Hong Kong companies shows that nobody named Quiros and no company called GSI directs any Hong Kong company.

A search of regulatory filings in the U.S. turns up nothing on Quiros until 2010, after he bought Jay Peak. A news search on Bloomberg turns up only GSI Group Inc., a maker of agricultural equipment.

The earliest mention of Quiros in securities filings in the U.S. is in 2011, as an investor in a U.S. biotech company. His Korean address in this filing was: 10th Floor, H&S Tower, 119-2 Nonhyun-Dong, Gangnam-Gu, Seoul, Korea 135-820. A reverse search of this address turns up nothing on GSI.

Are we therefore stunned to learn today that according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Quiros never used his own money to buy Jay Peak in the first place? Instead, according to the judicial complaint filed in 2016, Quiros took money investors had already put into Jay Peak when it was owned by the Canadians, and used that cash to buy the ski resort.

Subsequent cash that came in for new projects funded prior projects, but eventually the game was up when Quiros told investors that their hotel project was cancelled and converted into a loan. They would get their money back, he promised, but green cards would not be forthcoming. Quiros is fighting the SEC, while his President has settled with the agency.

In the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, there were red flags that sent many prudent investors away: a small-time accountant for what was supposed to be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, and no independent custodian for the investor money.

In the case of Quiros and the Vermont project, a history of unhappy investors and a murky source of funds should have been enough for investors to say, “Not this one.”

 

About the firm:

Charles Griffin Intelligence is an independent consulting firm that performs investor due diligence for hedge funds, corporations and individuals both inside and outside the United States. We never do work for any EB-5 developer or regional center. We do not provide legal advice, but can help investors and their lawyers assess the business risk of an investment.

For more information about the firm, please see the website at www.charlesgriffinllc.com. You can also read our blog, The Ethical Investigator, at www.ethicalinvestigator.com

 

Step one: don’t have a manual. That’s the message in an information-packed new book about the inner workings of the SEC just after the Madoff and now largely forgotten (but just as egregious) Allen Stanford frauds.

Step 1

In his memoir of five years at the agency, former SEC Director of Investment Management Norm Champ (now back in private practice) writes that he was stunned to arrive into public service in 2010 to find that examiners had no set procedures both when looking at regulated entities or in following up on their findings.

“If SEC inspectors ever arrived at a financial firm for an examination and discovered that the firm had no manual about how to comply with federal securities laws, that firm would immediately be cited for deficiencies and most likely subject to enforcement action,” he writes in Going Public (My Adventures Inside the SEC and How to Prevent the Next Devastating Crisis).

Among his proudest achievements were instituting such procedures at the SEC, and holding accountable anyone at the SEC who begins to follow up on a whistle-blower’s report – the kind that the Commission ignored in relation to Madoff and Stanford.

We’ve written and spoken lots about our methodology for due diligence. You start from scratch and look not just to verify what you’ve been handed, but for information the person or company don’t want you to see. You don’t close investigative doors prematurely even though human nature makes you want to do just that.

Starting from scratch means that you assume nothing. You don’t assume Madoff has all those assets under management unless you check. It would have been easy to do but nobody asked. Anyone who was suspicious of the absence of an independent custodian or a major auditor similarly let it slide.

This is what we refer to as a Paint-by-Numbers investigation: the forms and relationships are all taken as givens, and all you get to do is decide on color. In Madoff’s case, the “forms” (the existence of invested money) were illusory. Who cares about the color (say, the risk profile of the “securities”) of something that doesn’t exist?

In Stanford’s case, there was lots of information he wouldn’t have been proud of. An April 2007 FINRA report on the Stanford Group Company said the firm had been found to be operating a securities business while failing to maintain its required minimum net capital.  A former employee of Stanford’s alleged in an April 2006 complaint in Florida state court that Stanford was operating a Ponzi scheme.

Without internal accountability procedures in place, did all of the people at the SEC just sit there? No. Champ (who arrived post-Madoff and Stanford) describes an agency packed with a lot of dedicated professionals but with a good bit of deadwood immune to the disciplines of the private-sector job market. As we read about the federal budget proposals that seek to cut funding at a variety of agencies, this book contains two other pertinent messages:

  1. If you could fire people in government the way you can in the private sector, it would be easier for the government to save money.
  2. That battle is so tough that most people (including Champ) just try to work with the good people they can find and leave personnel reform for someone else.

Champ makes no promises that there won’t be more Ponzi schemes, but hopes that his organizational reforms will reduce the chances. As in any due diligence, you can’t promise that you will always catch everything – only that if there are repeated indications of a problem staring you in the face (complete with former employees blowing whistles), you will follow up.

Among Champ’s recommendations for blunting the damage of the next crisis, one is especially welcome: eliminate the scandalous government sponsorship of lotteries. Lotteries are the world’s worst investment, and yet the poorest members of society spend like crazy on them, all prompted by a lot of misleading and predatory government advertising “far beyond what private businesses are allowed.”

Champ asks us to imagine what could be done with all that money people waste if it were properly invested and devoted to investor education.

We agree. The millionaires who lost with Madoff could at least have afforded $2,000 of due diligence on their investment. The poor who play the lottery and who should be saving their money are the ones who need help the most help from the SEC and from state governments that need to find a less repugnant way to raise revenue.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

 

What will it take for artificial intelligence to surpass us humans? After the Oscars fiasco last night, it doesn’t look like much.

As a person who thinks a lot about the power of human thought versus that of machines, what is striking is not that the mix-up of the Best Picture award was the product of one person’s error, but rather the screw-ups of four people who flubbed what is about the easiest job there is to imagine in show business.

Not one, but two PwC partners messed up with the envelope. You would think that if they had duplicates, it would be pretty clear whose job it was to give out the envelopes to the presenters. Something like, “you give them out and my set will be the backup.” But that didn’t seem to be what happened.

Then you have the compounded errors of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, both of whom can read and simply read off what was obviously the wrong card.

The line we always hear about not being afraid that computers are taking over the world is that human beings will always be there to turn them off if necessary. Afraid of driverless cars? Don’t worry; you can always take over if the car is getting ready to carry you off a cliff.

An asset search for Bill Johnson that reveals he’s worth $200 million, when he emerged from Chapter 7 bankruptcy just 15 months ago? A human being can look at the results and conclude the computer mixed up our Bill Johnson with the tycoon of the same name.

But what if the person who wants to override the driverless car is drunk? What if the person on the Bill Johnson case is a dimwit who just passes on these improbable findings without further inquiry? Then, the best computer programming we have is only as good as the dumbest person overseeing it.

We’ve written extensively here about the value of the human brain in doing investigations. It’s the theme of my book, The Art of Fact Investigation.

As the Oscars demonstrated last night, not just any human brain will do.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

This blog may be one of the few publications in the Western world that has never written the word “Kardashian,” but that has now changed. In the stories about the robbery in Paris of Kim Kardashian we found numerous issues that touch on the work we do.Kardashian Paris Investigation

After my recent book The Art of Fact Investigation came out in May, a number of people wrote to me and suggested another chapter in the next edition about what people could do to maintain privacy in the face some who may want to dig up facts on them.

The easy advice for Kim Kardashian-West: if you are on social media a lot with information about valuable possessions and your whereabouts, criminals will easily learn about your valuable possessions and your whereabouts. Big rings on Instagram? Not a good idea. The super-secret apartment hotel in Paris? With paparazzi following you everywhere, how secret is any place you go?

The harder advice both to accept and to act on relates to some speculation in the media that the crime was an inside job, because the thieves knew that Kardashian’s security guard was not on duty that night.

When we let others into our homes and into our lives, there is always the chance that one of those people may feed information to the outside. This is why many people like a preliminary background check of the electrician or plumber they are about to admit into their home. They like a more thorough look at someone who will watch their children. But Kardashian-West isn’t just dealing with plumbers and babysitters.

How many photographs are there of her bringing home groceries, for example? She eats therefore food is delivered by people. When she buys something large, that too is delivered. It is unlikely that she drives her car to Jiffy Lube when it’s time for an oil change. People drive for her.

We have written before about the value of talking to workers who have been in someone’s home. Movers, gardeners, handymen – all get to know the home to an extent and the people who work there. If one of them becomes estranged because they are fired or are not paid, they have every incentive to talk about the person they used to serve.

We are not saying that Kardashian-West has been betrayed by any of her staff. Only that when police found out that the bodyguard was off duty that night, they surely wanted to know: who else knew that? And they would have started the questioning close to home.

 

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

 

When your defense is that the law allows you to publish garbage without fear of prosecution, one takeaway is simple: the internet is filled with garbage that needs to be well verified before you rely on it.Internet searching

This blog thinks the Ninth Circuit got it right in exonerating Yelp this week from the lawsuit by a small business that was incorrectly identified in a negative Yelp ad. The decision is here.

While we feel terribly for the locksmith whose business was tarred with a brutally negative review that Yelp erroneously attached to his business, it seems clear that the court was right in deciding that Yelp was protected from prosecution by the federal Communications Decency Act.

The reasoning in Congress for this and other laws that grant safe harbor to internet facilitators of exchanges (of opinions, goods or anything else) is that if the internet sites were to be held liable for the contents of what they were portraying, the industry would shut down or need to charge a lot of money to compensate them for the risk.

As fact finders, we think the Yelp case is a handy example of why just about anything on line should be verified if you intend to make any kind of important decision based on what you read.

We recently had a case in which a negative review of a doctor became relevant in a malpractice case. Question one to us was: is this reviewer a real person and if so who is she? Based on her Yelp handle and city we managed to find her and to take a statement from her that turned out to be even more valuable than what she had posted on Yelp.

But what if “she” had turned out to be a competitor, an embittered but deranged former patient, or just a crank?

This is the not the first time we’ve written about this. In The Spokeo Lawsuit: Databases are Riddled with Errors we discussed a database that spits out some free information but then asks you to pay for more (often inaccurate) information.

As we tell our clients all the time (and as I’ve written in my book, The Art of Fact Investigation), even the most expensive databases confuse people with similar names, leave out key information such as where a person really lives or works, and are mostly hopeless with linking people and their shell companies.

The internet is a wonderful, useful and time-saving place, but there is no substitute for a good critical mind to sort investigative gold from the masses of garbage you find there.

 

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

 

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal about “Why the Virtual Reality Hype is About to Come Crashing Down” makes the simple point that computers haven’t caught up to all the permutations of real life to make a “virtual reality” headset experience resemble a genuine experience.

A short demo is one thing, but life goes on after the short demo is finished.

philip segal the art of fact investigation.JPG

“The dirty little secret about [virtual reality] is that the hardware has run ahead of the content,” says the Journal.

My view is that catching up to real life is something that it is hard to see computers doing anytime soon, a point made in my recently published book, The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload.

The book makes the case that figuring out problems related to human behavior requires guesswork and the flexibility to change course when one series of guesses appears to be the wrong way forward. Computers are wonderfully flexible and free of emotional bias, but are completely unimaginative.

While computers can sort easily through data people enter onto their hard drives, they have a much harder time saying, “Here is something you should expect to find but do not.” Example: risk management programs failed to note the suspicious fact that Bernard Madoff’s alleged billions under management were audited by a tiny accounting firm in a suburban shopping mall. The computers did not say (because they were not programmed ahead of time to say), “I should be seeing a Big-Four auditor here but I don’t see it.”

But what about all the hype about “Big Data” and our ability to predict things based on billions or individual cases only a computer can keep track of?

The problem is that in some kinds of investigations (who is this particular person? What is the probable reaction of this particular company to litigation?) we don’t demand an answer about what other people or companies have done in the past.

Big data aggregates lots of individual results, but sometimes when the stakes are high, we want to disaggregate and find out what this particular person did at work eight years ago to prompt a departure left off a resume, or what this particular company’s board is like when faced with a lawsuit.

You won’t find those answers in any magical database. If you are lucky and smart, you will find some clues that will help you put together a probable story.

If that sounds less than the neat and tidy solution you were hoping for, who said real life was neat and tidy?

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.