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Linked – AI Will Save Lawyers Time – But Does Anyone Want That?
ByMike McBride July 12, 2024July 12, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

If the number they quote in the article about gaining four hours per week is accurate, that’s a massive change. In the last few months, many people in the industry have mentioned fixed-rate billing. It’s been an option for law firms for a long time, but it’s only gotten slight traction so far.

That might be about to change. Justifying the current economic model and investing in AI tools that save this much time will be quite challenging. The risks involved with “finding” more billable time are too high. I know; I’ve worked as a consultant before, and while it sounds great that finishing projects ahead of time frees you up to work on other projects, when those other projects don’t come in, you wind up short on your billable hour requirements and those tools that were supposed to make your work-life better, suddenly make it a lot worse.

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Blogging

Cloudflare Enters the AI Data-scraping Fray
ByMike McBride July 8, 2024July 6, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I read the post, I found it most interesting that so many customers have made it clear to Cloudflare that they have no interest in letting AI tools use their website content to train large language models. I hadn’t given it much thought, but I also don’t run ads or use my blogs as a side hustle like many others do. It’s easy for me to be uncaring about whether some information I share is being used to respond to someone’s AI prompts without linking to the site. I might feel differently if I depended on traffic to make this endeavor profitable.

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Tech

Google is also not Living Up To Carbon Emissions Promises
ByMike McBride July 4, 2024July 3, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

Like Microsoft, Google claims it will still run all of this using clean energy by 2030. However, the current emissions data do not indicate that this is possible. The need for energy will not go down, and these companies will not walk away from the trillions of dollars invested in AI already.

This is happening while we watch the earliest recorded Category 5 hurricane because of the extremely warm water temperatures in the Atlantic.

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Tech

Linked – The Real AI Revolution Will Be Invisible
ByMike McBride July 1, 2024June 28, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

That doesn’t mean we won’t make a mess of things getting there. Some employers will go through rounds of layoffs, hoping to replace workers with AI writers, photographers, coders, etc. Plenty of companies will rush to add something they can call “AI” to their products to look innovative, and everyone will stumble along learning what AI might be useful for.

Then, we’ll end up using the AI built into all the same tools we use now.

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Career

Linked – Return to Office, Return to Sexual Harassment?
ByMike McBride June 29, 2024July 4, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The article offers some suggestions on educating your employees about harassment and what you should be doing with programs, but I want to get brutally honest here.

What workplace hasn’t already held a sexual harassment seminar? Is it making any difference? Not when you tell me that remote work was the most effective way to lower incidences of harassment. Essentially, keeping people away from each other was the only way we found to significantly dent the overall statistics.

Want to know what would make a dent? Fire people. On the spot. Publicly. The first time it happens.

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Career

Linked – Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
ByMike McBride June 25, 2024June 24, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

This should not surprise anyone.

I can think of a few reasons why this should not have surprised anyone at Dell.

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