Briefs: Crowdsourcing Avvo, Email Encryption, the Worst Lawyers, Etc.

At least one Redditor is trying to reverse engineer the Avvo Rating. So far it looks like the biggest boosts come from adding an LLM to your profile or getting endorsements from lawyers who say they worked with you. Maybe the goat lawyer could learn something. [/r/LawFirm]

The legal sector added 700 new jobs in October. Way to go, legal sector! [The American Lawyer]

If you use the Google Inbox app, Gmail can draft replies for you — and it learns as you go. Finally, plausible deniability that goes well beyond auto correct! [redOrbit]

Kevin O’Keefe once again predicts the end of traditional legal academic publishing and — wishful thinking, probably — the mass adoption of law blogs by law professors. But I did just read that 40% of law review articles are never cited anywhere by anyone, including their authors. What a waste of time and money! [Real Lawyers Have Blogs]

Mailvelope is software that is supposed to make it “easy” to send and receive encrypted email. That’s why researchers chose it to study whether an average email user could send and receive encrypted email. Survey says:

The study gave 10 pairs of people up to 45 minutes to encrypt, send, decrypt, and read a message via Mailvelope. Only one subject pair was able to complete the task, and it took them the full 45 minutes; in addition, this pair had some previous familiarity with PGP encryption, unlike the rest of the subjects. In other words: The software was nearly impossible for a novice to use.

Encrypting some things — your hard drive, your Internet connection — has become trivially easy. But not email. Even Snowden got it wrong at first. [BuzzFeed]

This is one of the most readable contracts I’ve seen, from a design collaborative and its lawyer, Matt Sherlock. [Superfrend.ly]

These are the worst lawyers. [Slate]

Briefs: Crowdsourcing Avvo, Email Encryption, the Worst Lawyers, Etc. was originally published on Lawyerist.