National Association for Presiding Judges and Court Executive Officers

QR codes hold both positives and negatives as a new high-tech digital tool for trial courts

QR (quick response) codes are the black-and-white barcodes resembling boxes full of squiggles, squares and dots that have become ubiquitous on many forms of advertising. Invented in 1994 by engineers at the Japanese company Denso Wave, a Toyota parts supplier, as a means of tracking those parts, QR codes became more widespread in the 2010s as companies started using them to provide users with access to a wide range of services, including restaurant ordering, electronic payments and gaming.

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Four Ways to Deal with Misinformation in Decision-making

We live in a time of unprecedented access to information that’s available anytime and anywhere. Even when we don’t actively seek out opinions, reviews, and social media posts, we are constantly subjected to them. Simply processing all of this information is difficult enough, but there’s another, more serious problem: Not all of it is accurate, and some is outright false. Even more worrying is that when inaccurate or wrong information is repeated, an illusion of truth occurs: People believe repeated information to be true — even when it is not.

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When to trust your gut

Humans have been honed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certain situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors spotted movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and grunt questions later. At the same time, the capacity to analyze and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals. The question of when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—matters in the office as much as in the savannah.

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Six storytelling do’s and don’ts for lawyers (and court leaders)

Storytelling is critical to how people process information. It’s how we see and make sense of the world around us.

Only in the context of a story are facts memorable, understandable and impactful. Only with stories can we appeal to the whole person—the intuitive and emotional sides as well as the logical. To become better storytellers, lawyers need to leave the insulated world of legal practitioners and study what makes other professional storytellers—like novelists, journalists, advertisers and filmmakers—effective.

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The Power of Small Gestures

The secret to showing appreciation for employees sincerity. Appreciation should involve effort: a handwritten note is better than an email, which is better than an algorithm. It should feel personal, not part of a program cooked up by the human resources department. And it should be sufficiently rare to register as meaningful; thanking everybody for everything turns gratitude into a commodity. Individual court leaders can harness the power of small gestures to make a real difference in those they lead.

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Exonerations in America have risen, and their pattern is revealing

In the autumn of 2006, two teenage girls were sexually assaulted in Detroit. Within weeks, the police had their man. Terance Calhoun, a local 19-year-old, was spotted in a liquor store nearby and appeared to match the composite sketch the police had produced. He pleaded no-contest in February 2007 and was dispatched to prison. There was just one problem: he didn’t do it. A follow-up investigation in 2019 found a litany of red flags in how the case was handled, including an unrecorded police interrogation and the fact that Mr. Calhoun, who was found to be cognitively deficient, had been questioned without a lawyer present. On April 27th, after 15 years behind bars, he was exonerated.

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After the Smartphone… What’s Next?

Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs announced three new products: a music player, a mobile phone, and an internet communicator. As Apple’s then-boss gave his presentation, his audience slowly realized that the three products were in fact a single gadget: the iPhone. Cue applause, cue Apple’s renaissance, and cue a new era in technology as the smartphone overtook the desktop PC as the center of personal computing.

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