Be kind for one day

Every now and then an origin story just makes so much sense.

Have you wondered about Be Kind to Lawyers Day?

I hadn’t because somehow I’d managed not to have heard of this holiday. It was celebrated last week — on the traditional second Tuesday in April — and apparently it’s been around for years.

Where did it come from? Who decides that a day belongs to lawyer kindness? How exactly do you show kindness to lawyers (as opposed to everyday cruelty)?

This day, after all, is taken seriously. Holidayinsights.com, for example, offers suggestions for celebration. So does Clio.com. The North Carolina Judicial Branch on X wished us a Happy Be Kind to Lawyers Day accompanied by a lovely photo of Lady Justice in front of a verdant forest and mountain.

The State Bar of Wisconsin asked us on both X and Instagram, “What’s the kindest compliment you have received?”

No one answered the question.

The PA Association for Justice posted a very strange video that I won’t spoil for you.

A company called Lawfecta even had a Be Kind to Lawyers Day sale.

There are many more postings. Most of them were from lawyers. At least they can be kind to each other.

So I did some research — aka I Googled it — and it turns out that, at least according to the Internet, the holiday was created by a guy named Steve Hughes.

He’s a comedian.

Of course he is.

Now mark your calendar for Nov. 1. That’s Love Your Lawyer Day.

Equal non-rights? Is it possible to disempower women by empowering them?

A pair of women last week filed a discrimination class action in federal court in Los Angeles against a dating app called Bumble because it only allows women to make the first contact when there’s a heterosexual match.

According to the complaint “forcing heterosexual women to make the first move means men are the only ones given the option of being initially pursued in heterosexual matches, which not only disempowers women by destroying their freedom to choose whether they want the men to contact them first, but also shifts more of the overall burden of online dating to women.”

So the suit is on behalf of women who want less power.

The complaint claims that “many, if not most, heterosexual women who match with men online want to be pursued, not to be the pursuers.”

I don’t know whether this is true — I have no expertise in this area — but you’d think not all pursuit is welcome.

Bumble, as quoted in the complaint, claims that its policy is “shifting old-fashioned power dynamics and encouraging equality from the start.”

Equality through inequality.

This is giving me a headache and here’s the best part: Neither of the plaintiffs signed up for Bumble after finding out about the rule.

My guess is they were waiting for Bumble to ask them to join.

It’s coming. If you’re not already depressed about job prospects in law, you may want to skip this item. It seems that artificial intelligence is catching up to human intelligence. Humans may soon be working for computers, not vice versa.

A quartet of law academics and computer experts has issued a report announcing that GPT-4, the latest iteration of AI, has passed the Arizona bar exam and did better than humans in five out of seven test subjects.

At least the researchers tried to cheer us up a little. In their conclusion they noted that the AI “may still hallucinate sources, incorrectly interpret facts, or fail to follow ethical requirements.”

Just like people!

Maybe that shouldn’t cheer us up.

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