Because... the article clearly says the case began under the FORMER administration, and goes further to say that it's not clear whether the CURRENT administration is going to drop the case.
Kafka was trained as an attorney, after all.
It seems to me that if you can't timely procure your own records in a court case the case should be allowed to proceed with any assumptions based on them in your opponent's favor. Whats really the difference between taking 2+ years to procure a document and deleting that document?
Suppose you have a corporate mail server with all your mail on it, and a competitor sues you. Your emails are going to be full of trade secrets, prices negotiated with suppliers, etc. Things that are irrelevant to the litigation and can't be given to the competitor. Meanwhile there are other emails they're entitled to see because they're directly relevant to the litigation.
What option do you have other than to have someone go read ten years worth of emails to decide which ones they get?
> Whats really the difference between taking 2+ years to procure a document and deleting that document?
The difference is obviously that they get the document in the 2nd+ year of the trial instead of never.
The technology for legal review is extremely fast and effective.
This funnily enough sounds like the exact use case of AI in streamlining timely, tedious, but important matters. Now the that someone simply needs to verify that the filtered documents are relevsnt.
Of course, I'm assuming a world where AI works on this scale. Or a world where this slow walking discovery isn't a feature for corporations.
> The difference is obviously that they get the document in the 2nd+ year of the trial instead of never.
Yeah, after using that year to make billions of dollars. That's how the current AI litigation is going. Once again by design. Pillage until the cows come home in 5-6 years.
Now someone simply needs to verify that the filtered in documents are relevant and the filtered out documents are not relevant. But wait, that was the original problem.
Surely all of the AI hype is true and there are no hypocrites in Corporate America.
> What happens when a human misses over a document or 2?
If they were obligated to produce it and don't they can get into some pretty bad trouble with the court. If they hand over something sensitive they weren't required to, they could potentially lose billions of dollars by handing trade secrets to a competitor, or get sued by someone else for violating an NDA etc.
Worst case they are right and now we have more efficient processing. Best case, bungling up some high profile cases accelerates us towards proper regulation when a judge tires of AI scapegoats.
I don't see a big downside here.
>If they were obligated to produce it and don't they can get into some pretty bad trouble with the court.
Okay, seems easy enough to map to AI. Just a matter of who we hold accountable for it. The prompter, the company at large, or the AI provider.
There is an obvious downside for them which is why they don't do it. To make them do it the judge would have to order them to use AI to do it faster, which would make it a lot less reasonable for the judge to get mad at them when the AI messes it up.
> Just a matter of who we hold accountable for it. The prompter, the company at large, or the AI provider.
You're just asking who you want to have refuse to do it because everybody knows it wouldn't actually get it perfect and then the person you want to punish when it goes wrong is the person who is going to say no.
Well yes. This is all academic. I already said in the first comment that they have a financial incentive to stall the courts.
>You're just asking who you want to have refuse to do it....
I just want efficiency. It's a shame we can't have that when it comes to things that might help the people and hurt billionaires.
So what's really wrong with what I'm asking?
They have a financial incentive to not be found in contempt of court. And another financial incentive to not disclose sensitive information they're not supposed to disclose.
When false positives and false negatives are both very expensive, what's left is a resource-intensive slog to make sure everything is on the right side of the line. "Use the new thing that sacrifices accuracy for haste" is not a solution.
> I just want efficiency.
Asking for efficiency from the court system is like asking for speed from geology. That's not typically where you find that and if it is you're probably about to have a bad time.
The way you actually get efficiency is by having a larger number of smaller companies, so they're not massive vertically integrated conglomerates that you need something the size and speed of the US government to hold them in check.
Why do we accept mediocrity from the government we pay our taxes to? They can't be as fast and lean as a small team, but there are surely optimizations we can make in process, especially as technology improves.
>by having a larger number of smaller companies, so they're not massive vertically integrated conglomerates that you need something the size and speed of the US government to hold them in check.
Agreed. Now I'd also like to have that sometime within my (maybe your) lifetime.
But these two ideas aren't mutually exclusive.
To maximize throughput, proceedings are structured like batch processing systems. You submit work, it waits in the queue until the system gets to it, some intermediate decision is rendered, and then you submit some more work. For constitutional reasons, criminal cases cut in line, which can further increase the latency of civil cases. That means that, in a four-year case, the lawyers don't actually work on the case for four years straight. They do batches of work a couple of months at a time, and then work on other cases while waiting for the output.
Moreover, court case are, to a degree, inherently serial. Motions to dismiss--briefs that argue a case must be dismissed because its legally defective--must be filed before you start deposing witnesses or exchanging documents. You generally need to do depositions of witnesses after you've reviewed all the relevant documents. And all the fact gathering must be done before you file summary judgment motions--briefs that argue a case can be decided on the factual record without a trial.[1]
Part of the inherent delay is that the legal system is already an "exception path" in the ordinary course of business. A lot of time is spent waiting for people outside your organization who don't work for you. For example, when you're deposing a witness, they have work responsibilities, vacation plans, etc., and everyone has to work around that.
It's possible to structure cases where everything can be done in a year. That's what happens at the International Trade Commission, for example. Arbitration proceedings can also be structured like that.
[1] This also means that legal teams aren't very big. Massive corporate cases with billions of dollars on the line are handled with core teams of a dozen or so lawyers--with maybe another dozen or two parachuting in to help with specific phases like trial. Technology was squeezed out a lot of the parallelizable work. The days of 20 junior attorneys sitting in rooms reviewing boxes of paper documents are gone.
It’s not continuous. Court time in particular is a scarce resource. Many people are involved in complex litigation, and for almost all of those people it is not their only project / job.
> My guess is that it's like a poorly run software project: mostly empty, where Person X is blocked waiting on the output of Person Y for weeks, and so on.
Correct but the off times aren’t empty; the lawyers and staff simply pick up one of the other hundreds of tasks in front of them while they wait.
I take it you've never been party to a civil lawsuit between business entities or with the government.
>> Probably less about tax revenue and more about the executive branch squeezing tech companies to assert influence.
The case existed and presumably had the same lawyers all the while. How, then, can the case become less about tax revenue?
You may say that there are ulterior motives, but, at the most, one can say that additional concerns have complicated the tax revenue concern. We're well into fascist times, but the OP comment simply ignores the facts.