Associate's Mind

  I recently got around to reading a whopper of an old law review article that I had been wanting to read for awhile entitled, “Inside the Judicial Mind.” From the introduction: …we conducted an empirical study to determine whether five common cognitive illusions would influence decision making of a sample of 167 federal magistrate [...]

I came across a new law blog recently, entitled Circuit Splits, focused on splits in appellate courts sitting in different federal circuits. It’s a new blog, but it shows promise. In a recent post, they put up something I had been looking for in the past in and thought I would share: different ways to [...]

  Maybe others were aware of this, but I was not. Starting in 2007, the Law Library of Congress began archiving blawgs: The collection has grown to more than one hundred items covering a broad cross section of legal topics.  Blawgs can also be retrieved by keywords or browsed by subject, name, or title. I went [...]

  Remember that party from college? That crazy time where we went and picked up the security guard from our apartment complex on the Strip at 2 am? And instead of picking him up, we ended up going out with him and walking down the Strip barefoot. Then the sorority! And what about when the [...]

  As I’ve written about before, there is growing pressure on the legal industry from large companies that are producing standardized “form” documents for consumers at much lower costs than obtaining such documents from a traditional law firm. Yet somewhere in that process, a lawyer was at least involved in the creation of these form [...]

I recently received a review copy of Quisitive, a new iOS app for screening name ideas and searching U.S. trademarks from Weblaws.org. Upon starting Quisitive, you are presented with the following screen: One simply has to enter in a name, owner, or registration/serial number, and Quisitive will query the United States Patent & Trademark Office [...]

  If all patent litigations were adjudicated in 2008 the total cost would have been $31,224,000,000. _____ Seen at The Big Picture.  

When approaching a complex situation that requires a creative solution, some leading research points to a novel approach to problem solving. Don’t solve the problem based on how you would solve it, but instead pretend to be someone else and solve it from their perspective. Via BPS Digest: According to Evan Polman and Kyle Emich, we’re more [...]

How many advertising messages are you exposed to a day? Take a moment to think about. Billboards, TV ads, radio ads, web ads, branding on any packaged goods, clothing, objects all over your home (that iPhone sitting next to you), iconography, texts ads…it goes on and on. The estimates vary from 247 commercial messages a [...]

Interesting piece on on how to trick oneself into creativity over at Psycasm. I thought the best bit was below: In a seperate papar, Chrysikou (2006), looked at how best to train insight. It seems (from my understanding of the paper) that some simple mental-flexibility excercises significantly improve your ability to solve ‘goal-directed’ tasks. A [...]