John Flood's Random Academic Thoughts (RATs)

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I Swear This Problem is Universal....

on September 05, 2012

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(thanks New Yorker)

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The Accountants Are Really Coming...this time....

(thanks to giant bomb.com) I'm sure PwC, EY, KPMG, and Deloitte would like to be thought of the same way as these bands, but...dream on. Why are they there? A press release from Karl Chapman popped into my overstuffed mailbox saying Riverview Law has just been acquired by EY . Despite the hype of press releases, this is a significant move in the legal services market. At bottom it shows two things: NewLaw is coming of age and is now attractive to others; the accountants, particularly the Big Four, are serious about conquering the legal services market. Law firms should be worried because I believe they are on borrowed time. A few years ago I sat in a meeting at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in London discussing how and if accountants should be given regulatory powers in legal services. The accountants said they only wanted powers for probate. They declared they wanted no other regulatory authority. Really? I thought to myself. Surely no one believes that. The

Pssst! Wanna Buy a Law Firm?

Bruce MacEwen has an insightful post on external investment into law firms, in which he puts the scale of the proposed Clementi reforms on a par with Big Bang in the 1980s . He's right. Big Bang led to the disappearance of many British finance household names as the American banks came over and bought them up. Now the competition is a hotter because in addition to investment banks we've got private equity funds and hedge funds and various derivatives' specialists. MacEwen compares law firms to utilities, good, steady income streams. Big Bank took everyone by surprise (it was only meant to be a minor change in the Stock Exchange rulebook). And the Brits weren't prepared for the onslaught. They are about to do it again. Let's face it: law firms are populated by intelligent people but are they worldly-wise? No. Once they take the banks' shilling--and they will despite what they say--law firms are in for a big shock. Over time I see the prospect of the following ha

Professions, Machine Learning, Blockchain...revised

After receiving many kind comments on our paper, "Professions and Expertise: How Machine Learning and Blockchain Are Redesigning the Landscape of Professional Knowledge and Organisation", I have substantially revised it and put the new version on SSRN . I want to thank in particular Professor Laurel Terry of the Dickinson Law School at Penn State University. I hadn't realised how many convoluted sentences I'd written until she pointed them out and she came through with many new sources for me. The paper is extended and deepened. The deepening came about through my reading of Harry Collins' work on the sociology of science . He explained how acquiring expertise and knowledge is as much social as it is intellectual. The role of tacit knowledge is deeply embedded in social systems. And it is tacit knowledge that takes us from the idiot savant to the fully fledged member of a knowledge group. I have also included two 3D figures that illustrate knowledge acqu

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