Thing one:
Seems you can’t turn on your computer these days without the Nazis ruining something, the latest being them taking advantage of Substack’s platform to spread their nastiness. Let me get something clear here: I hate Nazis, and if you’re one of ‘em or agree with ‘em, you can get fucked.
Substack is the easiest method I’ve found for dumping the contents of my brain out onto my keyboard and having it appear in people’s inboxes. At the same time, the Substack people let Nazis have pro-Nazi newsletters on here, and have said they don’t plan on stopping. That’s the Substack people’s prerogative: it’s a private platform and they can decide who can publish on their platform and who can’t.
Whether or not I stay on Substack or move this newsletter elsewhere out of protest doesn’t make one whit of difference to the people running Substack. So for now what I’ve decided to do is this - I’ve donated what my “annualized revenue” from Substack over the past 12 months is supposed to be to the Florida Holocaust Museum (I live in Florida), so a total of $2721. If you want to donate to them directly, you can do so here. Because fuck the Nazis.
Thing two - a new legal case about who can “practice law”:
In North Carolina, a group of paralegals is taking a case to federal court and claiming that restrictions on giving legal advice violate the First Amendment.
Read about their case here, or you can go right to the complaint here.
The group behind this is the North Carolina Justice for All Project, a group of A2J-focused paralegals who really aren’t messing around when it comes to getting things done. They tried a legislative push in 2023 attempting to loosen restrictions, but it didn’t get very far.
Personally I think that the correct approach to loosening up unlicensed practice of law restrictions is to explore all avenues - judicial (filing a court case), legislative (passing new laws and/or repealing old ones), and administrative (getting the state bar to actually do something).
I found this excerpt from the complaint really interesting:
70. Additionally, the Guide & File system states: “Use this interview at your own risk! This interview is designed to help you. Because you do not have a lawyer, it is your job to make sure the forms and information you file to the Court are correct and complete.”
71. According to the North Carolina Equal Access to Justice Commission, as of 2021, there is an 80% drop off between the number of Guide & File users and the number of users that make it through to the end of the system’s prompts (and thus generate a file).
An 80% drop-off rate seems pretty high! Especially when you consider that these kind of systems are held up like some kind of panacea. The reality is that our system is broken on so many levels that just slapping some tech on a broken process only perpetuates a broken process, but with technology.
Thing three - some evidence of my fears about AI, search engines, and people actually getting to legal information websites:
This is a pretty deep dive on the black art of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and what goes where on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and what happens to those websites on the coveted front page of Google once they move to a full Generative-AI experience.
I’ve said before (the idea isn’t mine by any stretch) that Google is the universal legal triage system for most people. Legal aids, grant funding agencies, and non-profits pay for and build statewide websites based on an underlying assumption - that people are going to find the website on Google and use it to get information. So what’s going to happen if Google goes full-send (or even partial-send) on Generative search and all of a sudden nobody’s going to these websites?
From the article:
• Google displays a Search Generative element for 86.8% of all search queries.
• 65.9% of the time a small generate button appears but 34.1% of the time a pre-populated SGE element appears with a ‘Show More’ link.
• When a user clicks on the SGE button or the ‘Show More’ link, then the No.1 organic listing shifts down the page by 1,562 pixels and 1,630 pixels respectively. This is ~1.5 times the height of the viewport and therefore it’s inconceivable that this won’t impact click-thru rates and organic traffic.
Honestly if we really want to make sure people in need see the free resources we want them to, we need to figure out how to work with Google and make sure the right information shows up whether its on our sites or on Google itself. I wonder if we’re ready to do that. I also wonder if Google would actually work with us.
Thing four - trying to get back on a better writing schedule:
This year I’m going to try and get something out every week on here, which will probably mean many of these posts will be shorter, and some will be longer. Hopefully I can stick to that schedule.
I used the total amount and not what I’ve actually gotten gotten, which is less, since Substack takes 10% off the top and I’m also too lazy to use a calculator.