Post by Ken JP Bodnar

A lawyer in my network messaged me. He said" OK smarty pants, you have been posting about web-scraping and natural language processing. How does that help me?". He was a lawyer who writes an 80 page document & calls it a brief. So I was reading about the case when Texas cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey for calling beef a dangerous product. The headline said "Oprah Grilled By Cattlemen Lawyers". I still can't get that image out of my head.  Because Oprah is a gazillionaire, she was able to hire all sorts of experts in every possible related field that remotely touches on the courtroom environment. And it was the seminal moment when she hired Doctor Phil to advise on the psychology of jury selection. After she won, she profiled Dr. Phil on her show, and that unleashed his Jerry Springer-type of television show genre that exploits human misery and yet has an undeniable allure among the lesser enlightened, lesser-toothed population. Dr. Phil did recognize the importance of psychology in the court room. Today, research on this paradigm has shown that mimicry has the power to influence social judgment and behavior toward the mimicker. Recent experimental studies conducted in field settings show that using mimicry could influence compliance towards a mimicker’s request, enhance social relationships, increases affiliation & rapport and enhances pro-social behavior. (European Journal of Social Sciences – Volume 8, Number 2 (2009) Mimicry in Social Interaction: Its Effect on Human Judgment & Behavior, Gueguen et al). So, to my lawyer friend, if you want to influence judges while arguing a case (remember, a judge is just a lawyer who once knew a politician), you have to stack all of the cards in your favor. And that my briefcake friend, involves using language, metaphors, similes & styles that the judge uses. They will subliminally recognize them and think favorably of you. Their ears are being stimulated by well-worn words, ideas & memes that are as familiar to themselves as their favorite pair of starched undies. And that is where Natural Language Processing in AI comes in. The task is to get an AI guy, collect a bunch of court transcripts involving that judge, prune out everything except for the utterances of the shreckoning personage on the bench, and NLP process it for key phrases that is in habitual use. You can talk to the judge in his/her own vernacular. If they are from Texas, they will immediately understand phrases like "Your Honor, they are hanging the wrong horse thief", or "This ain't my first rodeo, your Honor", or "the prosecutor is itching for something they won’t scratch for" (translation -- reaching too far to make their case). And then you will be the good guy in their books. Folks thin slice all the time. In other words, they make a judgement on you in the first ten seconds that they see and hear you. And pushing the envelope with every possible advantage should be in the arsenal of every a̶m̶b̶u̶l̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶s̶e̶r̶ lawyer.