Rov_Scam
5hr ago
If there's case law suggesting that it applies to opening a checking account, I'll concede the point. But that doesn't mean there's criminal liability in this case, because we still have to meet the elements of the crime. As @odd_primes points out, there are three elements:
- Make a false statement to a Federally insured financial institution
- Knew the statement was false, and
- Did so for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of the institution.
I get why 1 and 2 would seem self-evident, but it isn't clear to me whether either of these prongs have been met. The alleged false statements were contained in documents called "Sole Proprietorship Resolution of Authority", which stated, for each of the at-issue accounts:
I, [Employee], certify that I am sole owner of the above named proprietorship, Federal Tax ID number [9788], engaged in business under the trade name of [Company].
The evidence that they present of these statements being false is that, following an investigation by the bank, the accounts were closed and the SPLC had a discussion with the bank memorialized in a letter stating that the accounts were opened for the benefit of SPLC operations and under their authority. The confusion here arises from the difference between legal ownership and beneficial ownership. To cite an example that explains the difference, we'll go with one I'm familiar with, the lawyer trust account.
Suppose a client hires my law firm to handle a commercial real estate transaction worth several million dollars. They give me a check for 5 million dollars so that when the closing date arrives, I will have the cash on hand and be able to pay the seller. In the meantime, though, there will be due diligence and continuing negotiations, and the actual closing date may be several months from when the client gives me the money. I can't just deposit the check in my firm's operating account, because it's not mine to spend, and comingling client funds with my own would get me in trouble. Since the money is likely to generate a non-negligible amount of interest during the time the transaction is pending, I have to open up a client trust account with a bank so that the client doesn't lose anything because of the delay. I am legally responsible for this money and I'm legally the only one with the authority to spend it. But the only way I can spend it is by paying the seller of the property, and if the deal falls through I have to return it, along with any interest it accrued. I am the legal owner, and the client is the beneficial owner.
This distinction comes up a lot in the context of contemporary FinCen and KYC regulations because criminal enterprises will often try to hide behind webs of LLCs. The LLC is the legal owner of the money, but since the LLC has an owner, that owner is the beneficial owner. So If I start a single-member LLC it's easy because I'm the beneficial owner. It gets more complicated when the LLC in question is owned by other LLCs, which are in turn owned by other LLCs, and it takes a day on the Secretary of State's website and lots of money spent ordering incorporation documents that are on microfilm in order to figure out who the physical person is behind everything. The implication that the prosecution appears to be making here is that since the accounts were being used for SPLC purposed, the SPLC was actually the beneficial owner of the accounts, and the statements that the employee was the sole owner of the accounts were therefore false.
There's one problem with this theory, though—sole proprietorships do not have beneficial owners. All a sole proprietorship is is a business name that an individual uses. There is no separate corporate structure apart from the individual. The way counties record them is instructive, either as "fictitious names" or "doing business as". e.g. Robert T. Beck dba Beck Paving Company. The idea of a sole proprietorship having a separate beneficial owner is similar to the idea of an individual having a separate beneficial owner. For that reason, all the various regulation that's been put in place over the years regarding disclosure of beneficial owners doesn't apply to sole proprietorships. The point of the Resolution of Authority is to certify to the bank that you are the person legally authorized to open the account, and to appoint agents who will have access the account. A beneficial owner does not have this authority; if I open a client trust account the client doesn't have any authority to access the account or to designate agents. The same is true for an LLC. If there is a web of legitimate LLCs, and the one I'm in charge of running is owned by another LLC with a different board and different management four layers above, those owners/managers can't open bank accounts in their capacity as beneficial owners. If you look at Resolutions of Authority for LLCs, they don't ask about beneficial ownership at all; in fact, they don't ask about ownership at all. All they ask is for the person opening the account to affirm that they have been authorized to open the account and to provide paperwork to that effect.
Assuming that the person who opened the accounts was indeed the legal owner of the sole proprietorships, and the indictment doesn't suggest that he wasn't, you have imply that the language in the Resolution of Ownership implied that it was also refering to some type of beneficial ownership, which wouldn't make any sense. Now, one could make the argument that due to some kind of collateral agreement between the legal proprietor and the SPLC that some sort of beneficial ownership did exist. I can't find any law suggesting that such an arrangement is possible; maybe you can. But even then, in order to prove that the statement was a lie, you'd have to prove that the bank contemplated such an interpretation at the time, and it's highly unlikely that the government has such proof, since the nature of the paperwork they are using as evidence isn't used to determine beneficial ownership even when a beneficial owner who would not appear on that paperwork could theoretically exist. And that still doesn't get you all the way there, because that only gets us to the second prong, that the person opening the account interpreted it this way as well, and thus knew they were making a false statement. If someone asks you if you own a company without any qualification, and you are the only legal owner, and you say yes, you can't say they knew they were lying because some obscure interpretation that you weren't made explicitly aware of exists which would make the statement untrue.
And we haven't even gotten to the third prong yet, and it's likely to fail here as well, that the false statement was made to mislead the bank. It's unclear why the person opening the account would have a motive to mislead the bank. In the case you cited, it was clear that the guy was trying to mislead the bank because he was using the accounts to deposit checks made out to somebody else. The indictment alleges that the accounts in the present case were used to mislead third parties as to the source of the funds, but that isn't an element of the offense. The SPLC had its own account with the same bank, and there's nothing in the indictment to suggest that the bank would have refused to open the accounts had they known that the SPLC was behind them, or that the employee who opened them was deliberately trying to conceal their purpose. This is the weakest argument, since one could argue that any false statement was made to mislead the person to whom it was made, but it would take a miracle to even get this far, and such an implication is just as weak for the prosecution.
Are we assuming that the organization boasts on its website about how it opposes "trail obliteration"?
No, but if you want to split that particular hair then it works both ways. Where on the SPLC website did it say they wouldn't give money to a particular group? That's beside my point though, which is that the language is simply too vague to prove fraud. Look at a typical fraud case: I tell you that if you invest your money with my firm I'll put it in the stock market, and you chose a few funds to invest in. In the meantime, I use your money to make loans to my son's unsuccessful woodworking business, and I produce fraudulent statements showing the amount of money you would have had if I had invested the way I told you I was going to. In other words, there was a clear promise that I would do something, made to you in particular, you relied on that promise, and you can imply from the circumstances that I never intended to invest your money the way I promised. That's a very different circumstance than a general statement made on a website that you can't prove that any individual donor actually saw, let alone relied upon. In the nonprofit environment, misusing restricted funds comes looks a lot more like traditional fraud than using general funds that may be at odds with what is said on a website, in that you made a specific promise to a specific donor to use funds a certain way, and then used them for something else. And even in those cases, the result isn't a fraud prosecution, but a civil suit from the state AG to recover the money, and possibly loss of tax status.
Look, I don't have much love for the SPLC, would never consider giving them money, and I understand your arguments. But I'm not willing to squint hard enough to believe that this indictment is any more than an attempt to spin straw into gold.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
Yeah, I'll get to the question later. I've been working quite a bit and didn't have time to give a proper answer. Hopefully I'll get to it later today.
Rov_Scam
13hr ago
What concessions do you realistically think the pro-gun people would be willing to make?
Rov_Scam
1d ago
A lot of people, myself included, who work traditional office jobs have a lot of flexibility when we have to be at the office, even if we're technically 100% in-person. I'm sure the government and some large globocorporations have detailed sign-in procedures, but no one at any non-governmental office I've ever worked at paid much attention to when you were coming and going. My father, who punched a clock his whole life, never understood how cavalier I could be about what time I got to the office, since being 5 or 10 or even an hour late never mattered much so long as I got my work done. Same thing with lunch breaks—I could and still can disappear for half the afternoon without anyone realizing I'm gone.
There are also a lot of people who just work odd hours. Industrial work, retail, and healthcare are the most notorious for this, but my neighbor, for instance, in a floor manager at a casino and works 3am to 11am, so she's home during the afternoon every day, and her days off are Wednesday and Thursday. A friend of mine who drives a tow truck for PennDOT works 4 tens followed by two days off, so his "weekends" are always shifting. Another friend who is a stationary engineer works a similarly goofy schedule. A friend of mine who does power plant outage work only works in the spring and fall, but racks up enough overtime to cover his expenses for the whole year. Teachers don't work much over the summer and have random days off. I have several friends who work for paving companies and are effectively off all winter. The idea that everyone besides young people, retirees, housewives, and the unemployed is stuck at work all day during the week is an overgeneralization.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Compromise projections are the best projections. The purpose of a world map is to see where things are at, not to make precise measurements, unless you're a sailor or something. I don't care if size or shape are distorted a little, as long as it doesn't look ridiculous, and compromise projections are the only ones that don't look ridiculous. If we're talking local maps then Transverse Mercator is the only way to go, since the meridian is chosen based on the local area you're mapping. If people are going to be so insistent about the metric system then I'm going to be insistent about UTM, which by all rights should replace latitude/longitude since a grid is inherently superior to an angular system. If someone decides to send me a pin for directions I'm going to insist that it's in UTM from now on, in case my phone dies and I have to navigate with map and compass.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It wasn't a bad song until I had to listen to it 20 times a day. I predict that in 25 years it will have the same status as "Dreamlover" by Mariah Carey, i.e. it's so ubiquitous that everyone collectively gets tired of it and agrees to never speak of it again.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
The US didn't have any ground troops, no. But they were supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army, which had 25,000 troops fighting in a country with 0.6% the land area and 2% the population of Iran. If there were an Iranian Liberation Army with a million troops, I'd agree with you that an air campaign would probably be successful.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"?
Actually having a ground invasion or otherwise supporting ground forces is a pretty big difference. It isn't some minor detail used to casually dismiss the argument.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. You can say that they faked 700 groups, fine, but making up a fake hate group isn't a crime. The crime is that they made up the groups to convince people that hate groups were a problem when they weren't. What you now have to prove is that 300+ hate groups is effectively nothing.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
That's fine as a theory, it just suffers from the critical weakness that there's no evidence for it whatsoever, and it doesn't mesh with the current indictment, though the indictment is so poorly drafted that I don't know that any theory really meshes with it. Unless you're aware of some memo that the US Attorney is not that lays all this out in detail, trying to prove this through extrinsic evidence is going to be tough sledding indeed.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
No, I'm saying that you aren't aware of the burden of proof your argument requires to stand up in court. The SPLC lists over 1300 hate groups on its website. For your theory to hold up you would have to be prepared to present evidence that somewhere between an overwhelming majority and all of them are figments of the SPLC's imagination and/or filled with SPLC plants, that the SPLC knew these were all fake, and that the SPLC deliberately sounded the alarm about this fake problem anyway because they wanted the money. It's not that black people would never believe this, it's that the only people stupid enough to actually believe this are whites who want to believe it for self-serving reasons.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
If that's what you think, fine, but it means that the government's case requires them to prove that hate groups aren't a problem. To an Alabama jury that's likely to have more than a few black people on it.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups? Or do you think this was all part of a weird, hare-brained scheme to achieve some ostensibly left wing goal? If you seriously believe that it's the former, and the government can prove that it's the former, then yes, I will agree with you and say that there is at least a decent case for fraud here. But if it's the latter, then it's just a group of people who used questionable tactics and bad judgment,
Rov_Scam
3d ago
An even better example would be if investigators discovered several invoices to contractors for "trail obliteration" totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trail obliteration is the process of disbanding and renaturalizing eroded, worn out trails to limit additional damage and provide a better user experience through reroutes. At minimum, this can be done by volunteers in an afternoon by disguising the entrance of the old trail with brush for the first 50 yards or so. At maximum, this can involve going in with heavy equipment to regrade the entire corridor, followed by covering the disturbed area with brush and new plantings. It's a necessary management practice where appropriate, but it's always a hard sell to donors, land managers, and even within the organization, because when you have to fight tooth and nail to get every mile of trail built no one wants to hear how much money you plan on spending to get rid of mileage. But identifying old, unsustainable trails and getting rid of them is a best practice, and this type of work is related to the core mission of any trail development organization, regardless of how contradictory or unpopular it may be. It is not, however, evidence that the organization hates trails and is trying to get rid of them.
Do you seriously believe that the reason the SPLC gave these groups money is because their directors are actually white supremacists who are trying to fleece their liberal donors? Because that's what would be required for their donations to constitute the kind of fraud that you're alleging. It seems more likely to me that, whatever their exact thought process, it was part of a scheme that they thought would benefit their mission. It may have been a dumb, misguided scheme that was unlikely to work and that would have pissed off their donors had they known about it, but wire fraud isn't about making misleading statements over the internet that some people don't like. It's a crime with specific elements that must be satisfied, and there's no evidence that they were satisfied in this case.
That seems like money laundering to me. I mean, they are setting up phony bank accounts in order to conceal the source of money.
Whether or not it seems like money laundering to you is irrelevant. Let's look at the statute:
Whoever, knowing that the property involved in a financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, conducts or attempts to conduct such a financial transaction which in fact involves the proceeds of specified unlawful activity...with the intent to promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity; or knowing that the transaction is designed in whole or in part to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity...shall be sentenced to a fine of not more than $500,000 or twice the value of the property involved in the transaction, whichever is greater, or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.
I've omitted a lot of irrelevant surplussage, but the upshot is that you can't launder legally earned money. It isn't a crime to play secret Santa. If there's no fraud, then there's no laundering.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
This is pretty thin gruel. Nonprofits have broad discretion to use unrestricted funds any way they see fit to support their mission. Cases of nonprofit fraud usually fall into five general categories:
-
Entirely fraudulent nonprofits: These are grifts from the beginning where the founders never intended to spend any of the money they raised on the ostensible purpose and only lined their pockets. This is the most obvious fraud.
-
Embezzlement: Where an employee or director of a legitimate nonprofit misappropriates funds to line his pocket. Again, an obvious fraud, though it's limited to one person (or a few people) and isn't representative of the organization as a whole.
-
Questionable nonprofits: This is a term I made up to refer to organizations whose administrative expenses are grossly disproportionate to program expenses. E.g., a food pantry in a large city that raised $45 million one year but only distributed $149,000 worth of food. These are usually the biggest media scandals because they often involve large organizations that do a lot of advertising and fundraising, reflected in financial statements that suggest they spend money on little else than advertising and fundraising.
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Improper use of restricted funds: This is often benign in a PR sense but serious in a legal sense. If someone donates money for a specific project, it can't be used for another project or to cover general expenses. If the food bank in the above example solicited donations for a building fund that would pay for planned renovations to their facility, and when food stamps were in jeopardy last fall they raided the fund to buy food for the needy, one could argue that it wasn't that big of a deal, maybe even the right thing to do. But it isn't permitted.
-
Other improper use of funds: Again, this usually involves some personal benefit to the organization's employees or directors, like directing program services towards them or distributing profits. It also includes other miscellaneous non-nos like spending money on political campaigns or endorsements and improperly paying volunteers in ways that subject you to labor laws that you aren't following.
The first thing I would note for any of these is that none of them is particularly likely to result in a Federal fraud indictment. regulation of nonprofits is done at the state level, usually by the AG. Federal involvement is limited to the IRS for tax status and the FTC if they are large organizations that do a lot of advertising. What SPLC is accused of doing, though, doesn't fit into any of these categories, and there's no clear violation of nonprofit law. What the indictment accuses them of is fraudulently soliciting donations by using the funds in a manner that is inconsistent with the mission statement as it appears on their website. If what they are accused of doing is a matter for Federal criminal charges, then practically every nonprofit in the country should be charged, mostly for stuff that is entirely unobjectionable.
Consider the following fictional example: The Allegheny Trails Alliance is a nonprofit whose advertised mission is to support trail maintenance and construction on public lands in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They donate $10,000 in unrestricted funds to support a trail construction project in Garret State Forest in Western Maryland, which is outside of their technical operating area but is frequented by the same people who frequent trails in PA and WV. Is this wire fraud? What if they pay a contractor to perform invasive species removal at a state park where they have a maintenance contract? Is this wire fraud because it isn't directly related to trail construction or maintenance?
The answer is no, because advertising gets a lot of leeway when it comes to promises like this. Practically every product you buy contains some kind of statement that would constitute fraud if we held the manufacturers to their exact word. The biggest risk to a nonprofit spending program funds like this is from donors, who might not donate again if they don't like the projects. From a legal perspective, what matters is the mission statement that appears in official filings, and even then, most nonprofits write these as widely as possible, state AGs will only pursue the most egregious violations, and the penalties are civil, not criminal. But in SPLC's case, it's not even clear that what they did violated their ostensible mission. I don't think Todd Blanche or anyone else in the administration is going to argue that SPLC gave money to hate groups because they really like white supremacy. It's pretty uncontroversial that they were using the money to pay informants, and that they notified the authorities if any illegal activity was discovered. It may be a shady practice, but it's not directly contrary to their mission, and when you add that to the fact that the government is relying on an advertising statement on a website as an inducement for fraud, it's hard to see how this stands up.
The bank fraud allegations seem more serious, but upon closer inspection, they aren't. What they basically did is have an employee open up various accounts in the name of fictitious sole proprietorships. The SPLC then put money into these accounts, which were used to funnel money to organizations they targeted. The purpose of the fictitious businesses was to disguise the origin of the money from the organizations. If we look at the text of the statute they are indicted under:
Whoever knowingly makes any false statement or report, or willfully overvalues any land, property or security, for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of...any institution the accounts of which are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...upon any application, advance, discount, purchase, purchase agreement, repurchase agreement, commitment, loan, or insurance agreement or application for insurance or a guarantee, or any change or extension of any of the same, by renewal, deferment of action or otherwise, or the acceptance, release, or substitution of security therefor, shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.
I omitted a lot of surplussage there. In fact, I admitted so much surplussage that I wouldn't be surprised if the attorney presenting this to the grand jury read the part up to the ellipses and skipped to the end, because, and I never thought I'd say this, the indictment doesn't allege facts that make a prima fascia case! I don't see anything in that statute about opening a bank account. If you read the entire section, including the short title, it's clear that it is referring to loan applications. There are no allegations in the indictment that the SPLC ever applied for a loan. There might be some FinCen reporting requirements or something that they violated, but cursory searching has failed to uncover anything that would have been in force when the accounts were opened in 2008, which incidentally creates a statute of limitations problem as well.
The money laundering charges are subordinate to the fraud charges, and are thus bogus. I predict this goes nowhere.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I don't know that this is true. I used to do a fair amount of genealogy for work and large age gaps were pretty common in the old days. Even in my own family, my great aunt married a guy in 1931 (when she was 20) who was about 20 years older than her, and only a couple years younger than her parents. This aunt was like a grandmother to me but I never knew her husband, as he died in 1963, and I didn't really know much about him. Years later, my dad a comment about him along the line of the following when we were talking about the family history: "I don't know what she saw in him. He was like an old man, he never had a steady job, he was mean. I don't understand why my grandparents let her marry that guy." My uncle told a story about his first driving experience, when Uncle Lee asked him to take him to Oakland so he could buy a piss urinal for his basement. He used to tinker around down there and didn't want to walk upstairs and was tired of peeing in a bottle. So he asked my uncle, despite the fact that my uncle was only 13 at the time. My uncle said "Don't you need a permit or something?" and he just waved his hand and said no. So my uncle drove him to Oakland. He had a winter coat on and turned the heat up all the way in the car even though it was June. When they got there the place didn't have one and Uncle Lee got pissed off at the manager. Then when they were leaving my uncle backed into the alley and ran over a bicycle that was lying in the street. Uncle Lee got out and threw it while yelling "Goddamn kids with their toys!" Apparently my grandfather hit the ceiling when he found out about it.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
No, but most of the companies that went bust weren't ISPs but ancillary companies that had nothing to do with the Internet itself. Telecom definitely took a hit, but thatbwas due to optimistic demand projections that led to infrastructure build out that wasn't needed, not because they weren't charging customers enough. The current situation is like if they did what they did while offering everyone free access while undercharging people for faster connections. In any event, that build out was based largely on what the technology could already do, not what it theoretically might be able to do in the future. The money also wasn't nearly as much. The current situation is like if the ISPs were spending ten times as much money and were all unprofitable, and traditional telecom companies providing the same service were all losing money on it. In that case it's likely that Internet service would become hard to come by and expensive after the crash and it would have delayed the technilogy's adoption.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
If that were the end of the story it wouldn't be an issue. It's that it evidently uses significantly more computing power than the performance improvement would suggest, raising the spectre of rapidly diminishing returns.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
And LLMs are horrendously incapable of returning all matches for a query, even a super simple one.
Good God, that's a frustration that I totally forgot about in my various AI criticisms. I have, on multiple occasions specifically asked it to "Provide a comprehensive list of X", which list would include dozens of items, and it instead provides 5 examples, complete with shitty summaries I didn't ask for, which examples are the most obvious and well-known examples (obviously pulled from the Wikipedia page) that I wouldn't need a trillion-dollar technology to find.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I had my first "AI at work" experience the other day when I sat through a luncheon meeting presented by a rep for one of the big legal research companies. It was billed as a continuing education event but was really just a sales pitch for their AI products. The guy was able to cite two uses for AI in the legal field:
- Legal research
- Pulling information from documents (in this case up to 5000 pages)
That's all well and dandy, but I don't do either of those things very often. This wasn't presented as "the technology is quickly changing and you'll be able to do more in the future" as much as "this is all you can do within the bounds of ethics and without exposing yourself to a malpractice suit". The idea that law firms will consist of a few partners handling a suspiciously large number of cases by prompting AI to generate outputs is pure fantasy. The people who think that AI will take over everything do so on the assumption that all work boils down to a set of deliverables that simply need to be generated, when that's not the case. If I'm looking to generate deliverables, I can already have a paralegal do all the drafting and research and just put my name on it, because there's nothing that says you need a law license to do legal research or draft documents.
What the client is paying for is for someone to take responsibility for the case, and it would be irresponsible of me to "handle" a case about which I knew nothing. Most of my time is spent reviewing and analyzing facts. Sure, an AI may theoretically be possible that can determine what's relevant and formulate a strategy better than I can, but the AI is not going to be responsible for its output. I'm never going to trust AI with tasks I wouldn't trust to support staff, no matter how much I trust my support staff (and they're great, btw), because the client doesn't want to hear about how it's the paralegal's fault. If I allow AI to do all my work for me, and I go into negotiations missing something, that's a pretty big matzo ball hanging out there. It's not that I'm perfect, or even necessarily better than AI theoretically could be, but the client is ultimately trusting me to make the relevant decisions, and I can't make them without a thorough knowledge of the case. It's the same problem with autonomous vehicles. I said a decade ago that they would never catch on, not because of any technical limitation, but because auto manufacturers aren't going to take responsibility for them. We've already seen this with Tesla being very aggresive in their defense of lawsuits stemming from autopilot. I don't necessarily disagree with Tesla's stance on this as things stand now, but if a vehicle is truly autonomous then an accident isn't caused by negligence on the part of the driver but on products liability on the part of the seller and manufacturer. As long as auto makers take the stance that the owners of vehicles are ultimately responsible for them, true AVs will never exist.
The other big issue is data security. You can tell me all day long about how great Claude, or ChatGTP, or Gemini are, but in the legal world using any of these is a complete nonstarter. Any lawsuit is going to deal with confidential data, and some suits are going to deal with little but confidential data. At the very minimum, we need to use settlement histories to evaluate potential settlement value of a case. Google literally built its business around data harvesting, and the tech sector as a whole doesn't have a stellar reputation for protecting client data. Regardless of whatever "opt out" provisions are allegedly in place, no law firm in their right mind would take the risk of feeding reams of data into a chatbot if there's any risk whatsoever that that information will show up later in a chatbot response. And no, this isn't the same as companies feeding their proprietary code bases into chatbots; the code's confidential status is subject to the discretion of management. An attorney does not have the discretion to reveal confidential information, especially if that information will be harmful to the client in the wrong hands.
This is before you even get to the fact that the current technology is underwhelming even for legal research. It looks good in demos but as soon as you try to use it for anything it proves its inadequacy. For document summarizing, 5,000 pages sounds generous, but it's rare that I'm concerned about finding information in a single document. I said this in a comment last week, but the utility would be more like "search all the depositions we have on file and pull all the ones where a witness testified about X". Well, we have tens of thousands of depositions on file, most in PDF but some in a special format used for court transcriptions. Conservatively assuming 100 pages per depo and 140 words per page, that comes out to something like half a billion tokens of context required, before we even consider that PDFs take more tokens than plain text, and a lot more if they haven't been OCR'd (which most of these haven't). Even the document functions described by the sales rep weren't that good; the example he gave was that if you were searching medical records for mentions of cancer it could broaden the search to include mentions of specific cancers.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I can't find any evidence that this was a honeypot operation. She had some role in his campaign and was photographed with him, but I haven't seen any evidence of a romantic relationship.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Well, that's the problem, since it's only worth doing if I can feed in all the transcripts at once. If I knew which transcripts I needed, I wouldn't need an LLM to tell me! We're talking literally tens of thousands of transcripts here, most of them well over 100 pages. If I have to curate them to fit inside a reasonable context window, then I've already done 99% of the work, since it only takes a few minutes for me to look in the index and see if there's any relevant testimony. Even by my conservative calculations, at $5/token it would be prohibitively expensive to do anything, even if a large enough context window existed, and with that much context the LLM's accuracy would start to break down pretty quickly.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I haven't used AI for work and I don't know of anyone who does. I honestly don't know what I would even use it for. I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough. People bring up research a lot and it might be useful there, but I do research like twice a year.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
To illustrate the point from my own retail experiences from years and years ago: We had to do customer service training every year. I worked the service desk a lot, and my first year there I was always baffled by the manager's willingness to give refunds for stupid shit. For example, it was a grocery store, and we sold deli pizzas that you took home and made yourself. Someone tried to return one that 1. Was already cooked and 2. Had two pieces left. The couple's stated reason for the return was that it "wasn't as good as we remembered it being". I had to call the manager because I wasn't allowed to refuse refunds (this wasn't normally an issue since most refunds were pretty routine), and I was incredulous when he gave them store credit.
It wasn't until they started the customer service trainings that I realized that $3 was a small price to pay to keep from pissing these people off. They shopped there every week and weren't constantly returning items, and it would probably cost the store a lot more in the long run if they decided to go somewhere else. We had already disappointed them with the pizza, after all. Add to it the fact that stores will spend huge amounts on advertising without even thinking about it and then try to nickle and dime the customers as soon as they get into the store. I was told that we needed to provide an absolutely flawless experience to the extent possible. If someone asked where an item was we weren't allowed to tell them; we had to walk them to the location. The thing is, it's not like it was that great of a store or anything. Good service is just a customer expectation, and if you can't provide it, and can't make up for it in other ways (like having rock bottom prices), people will take their business elsewhere.
I think it's a bit premature to say Trump was the target. Apparently the gunman started shooting in the hallway outside the dinner while Trump was still inside, at least from what I can piece together from Wolf Blitzer's firsthand account.
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