USPTO Releases 2018 Performance and Accountability Report; Guest Blog by Chief Financial Officer Tony Scardino, January 31, 2019

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Thursday Jan 31, 2019 

USPTO Releases 2018 Performance and Accountability Report 

Guest Blog by Chief Financial Officer Tony Scardino

"I’m pleased to announce that the USPTO has published its Performance and Accountability Report (PAR) for fiscal year (FY) 2018. The PAR serves as the USPTO’s annual report, similar to what private sector companies prepare for their shareholders. Each year the USPTO publishes this report to update the public on our performance and financial health.

Our FY 2018 PAR charts the agency’s progress toward meeting goals outlined in our 2014-2018 Strategic Plan: optimizing patent quality and timeliness; optimizing trademark quality and timeliness; and providing domestic and global leadership to improve intellectual property policy, protection, and enforcement worldwide. In addition, the PAR provides information on the USPTO’s progress towards a broader management goal:  achieving organizational excellence.  These goals drive the quality and quantity of our service to intellectual property stakeholders over the last five years.

Quote by President Abraham Lincoln on the patent system, as displayed on the Herbert C. Hoover federal building in Washington D.C., headquarters of the U.S. Department of Commerce

While the PAR is a record of our achievements, it is also an honest discussion of the challenges we face as an agency moving forward under our new 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, which was published in November. We will continue efforts to issue predictable and reliable patents; continue implementation of the patent dispute resolution portions of the America Invents Act (AIA), including ensuring that procedures and standards are balanced and predictable; monitor and help address dynamic IP issues in Congress and the Courts; maintain the high and sustained trademark performance level in the face of significant trademark application growth rates; improve the customer experience and develop outreach at both headquarters and regional offices; expand on dissemination of data; maintain sustainable funding; and ensure our IT systems enable our nationwide workforce to serve our customers with a “24/7/365” operational capability.

Here at the USPTO, we take pride in producing a PAR that meets the highest standards of transparency, quality, and accountability. The PAR contains a wealth of data and historical information of interest to our stakeholders, including data on patent and trademark examining activities, application filings, and agency staffing levels. This information is conveniently presented in the workload tables section at the end of the PAR.

On the issue of financial performance, FY 2018 marks the 26th consecutive year that the USPTO’s financial statements have received an unmodified audit opinion. Our clean audit opinion gives the public independent assurance that the information presented in the agency’s financial statements is fairly presented and follows generally accepted accounting principles. The auditors did note a deficiency in our internal controls related to managing and configuring IT system access. We have already begun developing plans to address the auditor’s concerns. Despite this deficiency, the auditor found no material weaknesses in the USPTO’s internal controls, and no instances of non-compliance with laws and regulations affecting the financial statements.

The PAR is a faithful snapshot of the USPTO’s FY 2018 performance. I hope you find value in this document, and that it allows you to glean greater insights into the agency’s activities and achievements."

The Backlash to Larry Fink’s Letter Shows How Far Business Has to Go on Social Responsibility; Harvard Business Review (HBR), January 31, 2019

Mark R. Kramer, Harvard Business Review; The Backlash to Larry Fink’s Letter Shows How Far Business Has to Go on Social Responsibility

"Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor with $6 trillion under management, evoked heated controversy with his remarks last week that his company would change its hiring and potentially its compensation structure to advance diversity and ensure that five years from now the company is not just “a bunch of white men.” This follows on the heels of his annual letter to CEOs asserting that companies need to embrace a purpose beyond just profit maximization.

Critics, according to Fox Business, were swift to accuse Fink’s commitment to diversity as a form of “corporate socialism,” complaining about “the propriety of a public company executive using business resources and his perch as CEO to advance a personal agenda.” The Fox article went on to quote Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware, saying: “This is fundamentally not the role of a public company, and it’s unfair to investors who may not agree with his politics. A CEO shouldn’t use house money to further a goal that may not create economic returns.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Business leaders must finally, once and for all, let go of the outdated and erroneous notion that social factors — and not just diversity — are irrelevant to the economic success of our companies."

Warning! Everything Is Going Deep: ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’; The New York Times, January 29, 2019

Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times; Warning! Everything Is Going Deep: ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’


[Kip Currier: I just posted this Thomas L. Friedman New York Times piece as a MUST read for the students in my Information Ethics course. The "money quote" regarding the crux of the issue: 

"Unfortunately, we have not developed the regulations or governance, or scaled the ethics, to manage a world of such deep powers, deep interactions and deep potential abuses."

And the call to action for all those who care and can do something, even if it is solely to raise awareness of the promise AND perils of these "deep" technologies:

"This has created an opening and burgeoning demand for political, social and religious leaders, government institutions and businesses that can go deep — that can validate what is real and offer the public deep truths, deep privacy protections and deep trust."

Friedman leaves out another important "opening"--EDUCATION--and a critically important stakeholder group that is uniquely positioned and which must be ready and able to help prepare citizenry to critically evaluate "deep" technologies and information of all kinds--EDUCATORS.]
 

"Well, even though it’s early, I’m ready to declare the word of the year for 2019.

The word is “deep.”

Why? Because recent advances in the speed and scope of digitization, connectivity, big data and artificial intelligence are now taking us “deep” into places and into powers that we’ve never experienced before — and that governments have never had to regulate before. I’m talking about deep learning, deep insights, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition, deep voice recognition, deep automation and deep artificial minds.

Some of these technologies offer unprecedented promise and some unprecedented peril — but they’re all now part of our lives. Everything is going deep...

Unfortunately, we have not developed the regulations or governance, or scaled the ethics, to manage a world of such deep powers, deep interactions and deep potential abuses...

This has created an opening and burgeoning demand for political, social and religious leaders, government institutions and businesses that can go deep — that can validate what is real and offer the public deep truths, deep privacy protections and deep trust.

But deep trust and deep loyalty cannot be forged overnight. They take time. That’s one reason this old newspaper I work for — the Gray Lady — is doing so well today. Not all, but many people, are desperate for trusted navigators.

Many will also look for that attribute in our next president, because they sense that deep changes are afoot. It is unsettling, and yet, there’s no swimming back. We are, indeed, far from the shallow now."

Meet the data guardians taking on the tech giants; BBC, January 29, 2019

Matthew Wall, BBC; Meet the data guardians taking on the tech giants

"Ever since the world wide web went public in 1993, we have traded our personal data in return for free services from the tech giants. Now a growing number of start-ups think it's about time we took control of our own data and even started making money from it. But do we care enough to bother?"

Ethics as Conversation: A Process for Progress; MIT Sloan Management Review, January 28, 2019

R. Edward Freeman and Bidhan (Bobby). L. Parmar, MIT Sloan Management Review; Ethics as Conversation: A Process for Progress

"We began to use this insight in our conversations with executives and students. We ask them to define what we call “your ethics framework.” Practically, this means defining what set of questions you want to be sure you ask when confronted with a decision or issue that has ethical implications.

The point of asking these questions is partly to anticipate how others might evaluate and interpret your choices and therefore to take those criteria into account as you devise a plan. The questions also help leaders formulate the problem or opportunity in a more nuanced way, which leads to more effective action. You are less likely to be blindsided by negative reactions if you have fully considered a problem.

The exact questions to pose may differ by company, depending on its purpose, its business model, or its more fundamental values. Nonetheless, we suggest seven basic queries that leaders should use to make better decisions on tough issues."

Can we make artificial intelligence ethical?; The Washington Post, January 23, 2019

Stephen A. Schwarzman , The Washington Post; Can we make artificial intelligence ethical?

"Stephen A. Schwarzman is chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, an investment firm...

Too often, we think only about increasing our competitiveness in terms of advancing the technology. But the effort can’t just be about making AI more powerful. It must also be about making sure AI has the right impact. AI’s greatest advocates describe the Utopian promise of a technology that will save lives, improve health and predict events we previously couldn’t anticipate. AI’s detractors warn of a dystopian nightmare in which AI rapidly replaces human beings at many jobs and tasks. If we want to realize AI’s incredible potential, we must also advance AI in a way that increases the public’s confidence that AI benefits society. We must have a framework for addressing the impacts and the ethics.

What does an ethics-driven approach to AI look like?

It means asking not only whether AI be can used in certain circumstances, but should it?

Companies must take the lead in addressing key ethical questions surrounding AI. This includes exploring how to avoid biases in AI algorithms that can prejudice the way machines and platforms learn and behave and when to disclose the use of AI to consumers, how to address concerns about AI’s effect on privacy and responding to employee fears about AI’s impact on jobs.

As Thomas H. Davenport and Vivek Katyal argue in the MIT Sloan Management Review, we must also recognize that AI often works best with humans instead of by itself."
 

A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics Offers a Troubling Look Into Our Values; The New Yorker, January 24, 2019

Caroline Lester, The New Yorker; A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics Offers a Troubling Look Into Our Values

"The U.S. government has clear guidelines for autonomous weapons—they can’t be programmed to make “kill decisions” on their own—but no formal opinion on the ethics of driverless cars. Germany is the only country that has devised such a framework; in 2017, a German government commission—headed by Udo Di Fabio, a former judge on the country’s highest constitutional court—released a report that suggested a number of guidelines for driverless vehicles. Among the report’s twenty propositions, one stands out: “In the event of unavoidable accident situations, any distinction based on personal features (age, gender, physical or mental constitution) is strictly prohibited.” When I sent Di Fabio the Moral Machine data, he was unsurprised by the respondent’s prejudices. Philosophers and lawyers, he noted, often have very different understandings of ethical dilemmas than ordinary people do. This difference may irritate the specialists, he said, but “it should always make them think.” Still, Di Fabio believes that we shouldn’t capitulate to human biases when it comes to life-and-death decisions. “In Germany, people are very sensitive to such discussions,” he told me, by e-mail. “This has to do with a dark past that has divided people up and sorted them out.”

The decisions made by Germany will reverberate beyond its borders. Volkswagen sells more automobiles than any other company in the world. But that manufacturing power comes with a complicated moral responsibility. What should a company do if another country wants its vehicles to reflect different moral calculations? Should a Western car de-prioritize the young in an Eastern country? Shariff leans toward adjusting each model for the country where it’s meant to operate. Car manufacturers, he thinks, “should be sensitive to the cultural differences in the places they’re instituting these ethical decisions.” Otherwise, the algorithms they export might start looking like a form of moral colonialism. But Di Fabio worries about letting autocratic governments tinker with the code. He imagines a future in which China wants the cars to favor people who rank higher in its new social-credit system, which scores citizens based on their civic behavior."

If Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Talk, Britain Is Waiting: Facebook leadership has a history of lashing out instead of opening up; The New York Times, January 22, 2019

Damian Collins, The New York Times; If Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Talk, Britain Is Waiting:

Facebook leadership has a history of lashing out instead of opening up

"Mr. Collins is a member of the British Parliament....

So much of our lives is organized through social media, and many people use social media platforms as the main source of information about the world around them. We cannot allow this public space to become a complete wild West, with little or no protection for the citizen user. The rights and responsibilities that we enjoy in the real world need to exist and be protected online as well."

The AI Arms Race Means We Need AI Ethics; Forbes, January 22, 2019

Kasia Borowska, Forbes; The AI Arms Race Means We Need AI Ethics

"In an AI world, the currency is data. Consumers and citizens trade data for convenience and cheaper services. The likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix and others process this data to make decisions that influence likes, the adverts we see, purchasing decisions or even who we vote for. There are questions to ask on the implications of everything we access, view or read being controlled by a few global elite. There are also major implications if small companies or emerging markets are unable to compete from being priced out of the data pool. This is why access to AI is so important: not only does it enable more positives from AI to come to the fore, but it also helps to prevent monopolies forming. Despite industry-led efforts, there are no internationally agreed ethical rules to regulate the AI market."

Once Centers Of Soviet Propaganda, Moscow's Libraries Are Having A 'Loud' Revival; NPR, January 21, 2019

Lucian Kim, NPR; Once Centers Of Soviet Propaganda, Moscow's Libraries Are Having A 'Loud' Revival

"In recent years, the city's team in charge of libraries has discarded almost all traditional concepts of what a public library is.

"We have a different idea from the way things used to be. A library can be a loud place," says Maria Rogachyova, the official who oversees city libraries. "Of course there should be some quiet nooks where you can focus on your reading, but our libraries also host a huge amount of loud events."...

The library now has its own website, Facebook page and even YouTube channel.

"Moscow libraries aren't competing with modern technology, they're trying to use it," says Rogachyova. "The rise of electronic media shouldn't spell the death of libraries as public spaces.""

Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time; CNBC, January 8, 2019

Salvador Rodriguez, CNBC; Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time

"Former employees describe a top-down approach where major decisions are made by the company's leadership, and employees are discouraged from voicing dissent — in direct contradiction to one of Sandberg's mantras, "authentic self."...

"All the things we were preaching, we weren't doing enough of them. We weren't having enough hard conversations. They need to realize that. They need to reflect and ask if they're having hard conversations or just being echo chambers of themselves.""

Why these young tech workers spent their Friday night planning a rebellion against companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook; Recode, January 18, 2019

Shirin Ghaffary, Recode; Why these young tech workers spent their Friday night planning a rebellion against companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook

"“We’re interested in connecting, bringing together, and organizing the workers in tech to help us fight big tech,” Ross Patton tells the crowd. A software engineer for a pharmaceutical technology startup, he’s an active member of the Tech Workers Coalition, a group dedicated to politically mobilizing employees in the industry to reform from within...

A couple of earnest college students head to the front of the room to talk to the speakers who had just presented, asking them for advice on organizing. One of them, a computer science student at Columbia University, says he has ethical concerns about going into the industry and wanted to learn about how to mobilize.

“If I go into an industry where I’m building things that impact people,” he says, “I want to have a say in what I build.""

Princeton collaboration brings new insights to the ethics of artificial intelligence; Princeton University, January 14, 2019

Molly Sharlach, Office of Engineering Communications, Princeton University; Princeton collaboration brings new insights to the ethics of artificial intelligence

"Should machines decide who gets a heart transplant? Or how long a person will stay in prison?

The growing use of artificial intelligence in both everyday life and life-altering decisions brings up complex questions of fairness, privacy and accountability. Surrendering human authority to machines raises concerns for many people. At the same time, AI technologies have the potential to help society move beyond human biases and make better use of limited resources.

“Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics” is an interdisciplinary research project that addresses these issues, bringing engineers and policymakers into conversation with ethicists, philosophers and other scholars. At the project’s first workshop in fall 2017, watching these experts get together and share ideas was “like nothing I’d seen before,” said Ed Felten, director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). “There was a vision for what this collaboration could be that really locked into place.”

The project is a joint venture of CITP and the University Center for Human Values, which serves as “a forum that convenes scholars across the University to address questions of ethics and value” in diverse settings, said director Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics. Efforts have included a public conference, held in March 2018, as well as more specialized workshops beginning in 2017 that have convened experts to develop case studies, consider questions related to criminal justice, and draw lessons from the study of bioethics.

“Our vision is to take ethics seriously as a discipline, as a body of knowledge, and to try to take advantage of what humanity has understood over millennia of thinking about ethics, and apply it to emerging technologies,” said Felten, Princeton’s Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs. He emphasized that the careful implementation of AI systems can be an opportunity “to achieve better outcomes with less bias and less risk. It’s important not to see this as an entirely negative situation.”"

Top ethics and compliance failures of 2018; Compliance Week, December 17, 2018

Jaclyn Jaeger, Compliance Week; Top ethics and compliance failures of 2018

"Shady data privacy practices, allegations of financial misconduct, and widespread money-laundering schemes make up Compliance Week’s list of the top five ethics and compliance failures of 2018. All impart some key compliance lessons."

Leading With Ethics; Forbes, January 7, 2019

Janine Schindler, Forbes; Leading With Ethics

"In today’s high-visibility world with the constant social media avalanche, it’s more important than ever to ensure that, as a leader, your ethical message is consistent. Anyone out there can talk the talk, but if you don’t truly believe in the importance of ethical behavior in your business career, it will become apparent to your employees, your peers and to the people occupying the C-suite.

If you’re searching for the answer to the ongoing dilemma of how to nurture an environment of trust, accountability and respect in the workplace, start with practicing ethical leadership in all levels of management.

To be an ethical leader, you must demonstrate ethical behavior — not just when others are looking, but all the time and over time. Consistently doing what's right, even when it's difficult, should be an integral part of a leader’s makeup. If you behave in an ethical manner when you’re in the spotlight, but avoid responsibility, cut corners and value profit above people behind closed doors, it is inevitable you’ll be found out."

Trump’s bizarre statement on China dishonors us all; The Washington Post, January 11, 2019

Dana Milbank, The Washington Post; Trump’s bizarre statement on China dishonors us all

"Asked an unrelated question on the White House South Lawn on Thursday, Trump volunteered a comparison between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — and the leaders of the People’s Republic of China.

“I find China, frankly, in many ways, to be far more honorable than Cryin’ Chuck and Nancy. I really do,” he said. “I think that China is actually much easier to deal with than the opposition party.”

China, honorable?

China, which is holding a million members of religious minorities in concentration camps for “reeducation” by force?

China, which, according to Trump’s own FBI director, is, by far, the leading perpetrator of technology theft and espionage against the United States and is “using illegal methods” to “replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower”?

China, whose state-sponsored hackers were indicted just three weeks ago and accused of a 12-year campaign of cyberattacks on this and other countries?

China, whose ruling Communist Party has caused the extermination of tens of millions of people since the end of World War II, through government-induced famine, the ideological purges of the Cultural Revolution, and in mowing down reformers in Tiananmen Square?

Trump has a strange sense of honor. In April, he bestowed the same adjective on the world’s most oppressive leader, North Korea’s nuclear-armed dictator: “Kim Jong Un, he really has been very open and I think very honorable from everything we’re seeing.”

Now, the president is declaring that China’s dictatorship, by far the world’s biggest international criminal and abuser of human rights and operator of its most extensive police state, is more honorable than his political opponents in the United States.

In Trump’s view, your opponents are your enemies — and your actual enemies are your friends. How can you negotiate with a man who thinks like this?"

In Memory of Lawrence Roberts The man who actually got the internet going has passed away.; Slate, January 3, 2019

Morten Bay, Slate; In Memory of Lawrence Roberts

The man who actually got the internet going has passed away. 

 

"Why, you may ask, have you never heard of Larry Roberts if he was so influential in developing and implementing technologies still in use five decades later?

First of all, no single person is the “mother” or “father” or the internet. Hundreds of people contributed to its emergence, even in the early years. Second, we unfortunately often confuse achievements with likability and communication skills. The people lauded in the media as internet “fathers,” such as Vint Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock, and Tim Berners-Lee, have all made invaluable contributions. But they’re also excellent storytellers and charming personalities. The soft-spoken Larry Roberts and his stern demeanor didn’t work well on TV, and he spoke in technical facts rather than sound bites. But Roberts, driven by his credo of faster knowledge sharing for civilization’s sake, did more than anyone else to get the job done. Where others theorized, Roberts executed."

Accenture CEO: Diversity and Inclusion Start From Within; Fortune, January 8, 2019

Damanick Dantes, Fortune; Accenture CEO: Diversity and Inclusion Start From Within

"Good leaders succeed by not only treating employees well, but also by measuring the results of building an inclusive work environment. After all, “the real driver of culture [outside of good leadership] is about how it feels to come into work every day,” Sweet says."

Pennsylvania High Court Decision Regarding Data Breach Increases Litigation Risk for Companies Storing Personal Data; Lexology, January 8, 2019

Ropes & Gray LLP , Lexology; Pennsylvania High Court Decision Regarding Data Breach Increases Litigation Risk for Companies Storing Personal Data

"This decision could precipitate increased data breach class action litigation against companies that retain personal data. No state Supreme Court had previously recognized the existence of a negligence-based duty to safeguard personal information, other than in the narrow context of health care patient information."

Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers?; Science, January 3, 2019

Tania Rabesandratana, Science; Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers?

""In the OA movement, it seems to a lot of people that you have to choose a road: green or gold or diamond," says Colleen Campbell, director of the OA2020 initiative at the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, Germany, referring to various styles of OA. "Publishers are sitting back laughing at us while we argue about different shades" instead of focusing on a shared goal of complete, immediate OA. Because of its bold, stringent requirements, she and others think Plan S can galvanize advocates to align their efforts to shake up the publishing system...

"The combined weight of Europe and China is probably enough to move the system," says astrophysicist Luke Drury, of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the lead author of a cautiously supportive response to Plan S by All European Academies, a federation of European academies of sciences and humanities.

If Plan S does succeed in bringing about a fairer publishing system, he says, a transition to worldwide OA is sure to follow. "Somebody has to take the lead, and I'm pleased that it looks like it's coming from Europe.""

In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'; NPR, January 6, 2019

Michel Martin and Emma Bowman, NPR; In Newly Found Audio, A Forgotten Civil Rights Leader Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'

"He was an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and the organizer behind the 1963 March on Washington.

Still, Bayard Rustin's legacy as a leading figure in the civil rights movement is little known today, even among many history buffs and within the LGBTQ community. His homosexuality cost him that visibility and was considered by some as a hindrance to the movement's success. 

Rustin died in 1987, but his silenced voice was recently resurrected in previously unaired audio from an interview with the Washington Blade in the mid-1980s. The audio will air this week in an episode of the podcast Making Gay History. It was discovered by Sara Burningham, the podcast's executive producer...

To Rustin, asserting his identity as an African-American went hand-in-hand with identifying as a gay man. "It occurred to me shortly after that that it was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn't I was a part of the prejudice," he said. "I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me.""

2019 is the year to stop talking about ethics and start taking action: Here’s how.; Fast Company, January 4, 2019

Katharine Schwab, Fast Company;

2019 is the year to stop talking about ethics and start taking action

Here’s how. 

 "With so little oversight from regulators and continued poor judgment on the part of big companies, both consumers and makers of tech were asking: What does it mean to develop technology in an ethical way?

So far, that question has instigated a lot of talk, but 2019 is the year to take action. How? Here are seven do’s and don’ts for any company or individual dedicated to developing ethical technology in 2019... 

"Do take a class (or just read the news)

There’s a better way to help designers and engineers act more ethically when developing technology–educate them.

That’s the idea behind a series of ethical tech classes that have sprung up in places like Carnegie Mellon University, where computer science professor Fei Fang began teaching a class called Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. The idea: If computer science students can learn to think about the potential impact of their code, they’ll be more likely to make ethical decisions. The Mozilla Foundation is also throwing its weight behind this idea, with a multi-year competition that offers cash prizes to encourage professors to come up with ways of teaching ethics to computer science students that won’t make them fall asleep at their desks.

As for folks who are out of school: Take an online class. Or just read the news. As the North Carolina State University study on codes of ethics pointed out, developers who were more informed about current events were more likely to make more responsible decisions about how to develop technology compared to those without knowledge of those events."

Ethics Webinar: When an Attorney or Expert Screws Up; American Bar Association (ABA), Thursday, January 24, 2019

AMBAR.ORG     |      CAREER CENTER     |      MEMBERSHIP     |      CALENDAR     |      CLE     |   PUBLISHING

Oops: What To Do When an Attorney or Expert Screws Up Webinar | January 24, 2019 1:00 PM — 2:00 PM ET 1.00 Ethics/Professionalism CLE Credit   LEARN MORE

This program will address the ethical rules governing attorneys when they make a mistake or discover that someone else has made a mistake. The program also provides:

Practical tips for identifying mistakes Strategies for addressing mistakes with clients Practical solutions for resolving mistakes and avoiding malpractice claims Adverse consequences of not addressing mistakes early Practical tips to comply with ethical obligations and avoid malpractice claims Sponsor(s): Section of Litigation; Solo, Small Firm and General Practice Division; Senior Lawyers Division; Young Lawyers Division; Standing Committee on Paralegals; ABACLE Panelist(s): David Benkert (Ankura Consulting, Inc); Latoyia Watkins Pierce (AXA); Michael Leboff (Partner, Klein & Wilson); and Selena E. Molina (Associate, Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP) (Moderator)

2019: The Year of the Wolves Can the Constitution withstand the partisans?; The New York Times, December 31, 2018

David Brooks, The New York Times; 2019: The Year of the Wolves

Can the Constitution withstand the partisans?

"The story reminds us how thin the crust of civilization really is. It reminds us of what otherwise good people are capable at moments of severe stress and crisis, when fear is up and when conflict — red in tooth and claw — takes control."

The New Congress Has A Record Number Of Women — But Very Few Republican Women; NPR, January 3, 2019

Danielle Kurztleben, NPR; The New Congress Has A Record Number Of Women — But Very Few Republican Women

"Both parties also have different ideas about how important diversity is. One in 3 Republicans believe there are too few women in political office. In comparison, 8 in 10 Democrats think so, according to the Pew Research Center.

Walsh adds that pitching a candidate's gender as a positive factor is a tough sell in a party where "identity politics" is an insult.

"On the Republican side there is a real shunning of identity politics. In fact, when Paul Ryan became speaker, he thought that the number one reason that there was the kind of partisan gridlock in Washington was because of identity politics," she said. "So that makes it harder it makes it harder when you go out to raise money and make the case for why why do elect more women, if you can't talk about the substantive difference that they make by being there.""

Tech predictions for 2019: It gets worse before it gets better; The Washington Post, December 27, 2018

Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post; Tech predictions for 2019: It gets worse before it gets better

"2018 is a year the tech industry wishes it could forget. But 2018’s problems aren’t going anywhere.

It was the year we came to grips with how little we can trust Facebook and how much we’re addicted to our screens. It was the year that online hate and misinformation became an unavoidable reality and Google, Microsoft and Amazon faced revolts from their own employees over ethical lapses. It was the year Apple became the first trillion-dollar company — and then lost a quarter of that when we yawned at its new iPhones.

Even YouTube’s “Rewind 2018” video is already the most-disliked video in history.

When my Post colleagues and I looked into a crystal ball to make this list of nine intentionally provocative headlines we might see in 2019, it was hard to see past the problems we’re bringing with us into the new year.

New technologies like 5G networks, alternative transportation and artificial intelligence promise to change our lives. But even these carry lots of caveats in the near term.

I’m still optimistic technology can make our world better. So here’s a glass half-full of hope for the new year: 2019 is tech’s chance to make it right."