From LegalTech NY 2010: Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Lisa Sanders and David Craig on Intelligence, Intuition and Information

This is part of our summary analysis of LegalTech New York 2010.  For all of our posts please click here.

The Wednesday keynote presentation was titled “I3: The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition and Information” and the panel was Thomson Reuters Chief Strategy Officer David Craig, Malcolm Gladwell (author of recent books concerning intuition “Blink” and “The Tipping Point”) and Dr. Lisa Sanders (a medical columnist for The New York Times whose work was the inspiration for the TV drama “House” – that great show starring Hugh Laurie as the over-the-top doctor who falls back on intuition to make brilliant diagnoses).

The speakers recounted myriad ways in which technology can be used to help supplement the innate decision-making capabilities of experts in their respective fields.

The place was packed.  And Gladwell framed the all-too-familiar lament of e-discovery lawyers perfectly:  “How can we help the decision maker make sense of the morass of information around him?” 

Answer:  begin with law schools.  Students must be trained in ways to sort and analyze the massive amounts of information in systematic ways, much the way even the most experienced pilots still use manuals to guide their flights. 

Most amusing comment:  Thomson Reuters’ David Craig posed the problem for technologists this way: “The biggest technology of the past 10 years is search. Why wasn’t it called find?”   According to Craig, last year there were 2 billion searches performed on Westlaw, a nearly 50 percent increase from the year before.  Their news and financial information system used to hit 250,000 updates per second. It now processes more than a half-million updates per second. 

There are numerous Twitter streams that discuss the presentation.  But there is a great blog post by Jason Wilson which reorganizes various Twitter feeds and puts together the comments made by each panelist by topic, not chronological.  For the post click here. 

We were happy to hear Gladwell mention the “tsunami of information” that exists today – which mirrors our “tsunami of data” series (click here).  The panel’s conclusion?  The only solution to more information spilling forth from technology is the filter of human intuition. Until search engines can filter as well as they can find, they only add to confusion.