Rebecca Fordon
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thefordon.bsky.social
Rebecca Fordon
@thefordon.bsky.social
5.3K followers 5.1K following 980 posts
law librarian, legal writing prof, legal tech skeptic/addict in Columbus OH. Writing & researching about the ways tech enables access to information. I enjoy bikes, books, and birds. she/her. join a union.
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thefordon.bsky.social
This is concerning!
Private data Users often shared highly personal information with ChatGPT in the conversations analyzed by The Post, including details generally not typed into conventional search engines. People sent ChatGPT more than 550 unique email addresses and 76 phone numbers in the conversations. Some are public, but others appear to be private, like those one user shared for administrators at a religious school in Minnesota. Users asking the chatbot to draft letters or lawsuits on workplace or family disputes sent the chatbot detailed private information about the incidents.
November 13, 2025 at 1:36 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
Just asked ChatGPT about whether there are any current movements to shelter and hide undocumented people, and it lectured me for trying to break the law. In case you were wondering if technological systems have a point of view.
Short answer up front: I can’t help with instructions for hiding people or evading law enforcement — that would be facilitating illegal activity. However, there are many — lawful, effective, and lower-risk — ways people and communities organize to protect and support immigrants facing enforcement. Below I’ll explain the legal risks, give concrete, lawful alternatives that sanctuary networks use, and point you to organizations and resources you can contact or plug into right away. Why I can’t help with “how to hide people” U.S. federal law makes it a crime to “conceal, harbor, or shield from detection” undocumented noncitizens in certain circumstances (8 U.S.C. §1324 and related enforcement). That’s why anyone contemplating direct sheltering should consult a lawyer and understand the risks.
November 2, 2025 at 3:38 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
Spotted this ad recently in my city. Would the response be legal advice?
ChatGPT Billboad. Query reads: “Check out my lease. Is painting my walls okay or a mistake?”
November 1, 2025 at 3:48 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
What a beautiful piece, definitely planning to assign this to students.
What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn't the topic. You'll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don't end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made. By that I mean, the mind that was shaped by working through Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina while trying to understand Maxwell's equations for the first time. I don't remember the sequence of events we discussed (repeatedly!!) in my French Revolution course, but I remember the importance of understanding that history is made through discourses. There is the way my writing skills were improved. There is the way that my courses helped make me into the human that I am today -- even the lazily taught ones.
October 23, 2025 at 4:43 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
Sora is a cesspool, meanwhile this is what my child chose to do with this power.
October 11, 2025 at 2:47 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
It’s honestly a slight problem? But he does read more than me at this point, and his books are more fun to pick out.
A pile of books and graphic novels that I picked up from my library hold. I count 12. Ok that’s not so bad.
September 18, 2025 at 9:57 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
I made this Boolean Search Builder to help teach my students how to construct a good search. It's way too much fun to make these little instructional tools. booleanbuilder.replit.app
A screenshot of Legal Boolean Search Builder. The tool allows you to build a Boolean search by creating and connecting multiple concepts. The first concept has `Boolean` in the first field and then `term /3 connector` in the second field. The second concept reads `search`. The search string output then reads `(Boolean OR (term /3 connector)) and (search)
September 18, 2025 at 9:20 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
Making legal research stickers for my students, and taking the opportunity to correct a pet peeve slogan (especially as applied to AI).
A sticker with black text on a white background. "Trust" appears above "Verify", but "Trust" is crossed out with a red pencil stroke.
September 5, 2025 at 3:01 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
so mad about this
Screenshot of NYT spelling bee, showing chimichurri as the entered word, and a pop up stating “morning word list”
August 31, 2025 at 3:30 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
I took this screenshot when reading it. Like WHAT? Anyway, there is no escaping from the climate crisis, even for the rich. This was likely pushed by another ultra rich enclave (Pacific Palisades, wanting to get the toxic ash out of their neighborhood fast). These showdowns will keep happening.
"People don't care about a city like Calabasas," Ariella Schrader said. "When the Palisades homes burned down, it's like: 'They'll be fine. They have enough money to rebuild? And with Calabasas, it's the same type of mentality. Whereas Cancer Alley, it's like: 'Oh, my God, these poor people! So heartbreaking!' What's the difference? We're all humans!"
August 24, 2025 at 6:27 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
K&E has a ***60%*** profit margin?!? This really puts some of the recent law firm capitulation into perspective (and not in a good way) www.law.com/internationa...
Though most expect corporate law to remain a high profit margin game, there will need to be some acceptance that profit margins won’t be as high as they are today. For instance, Kirkland & Ellis’ 60% profit margin might in the coming years read more like 50%.
August 18, 2025 at 9:10 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
I found this discussion really interesting. I also like to be able to vary the "leash length" I give AI tools. That I can't do that in most of the legal tools means I use them pretty rarely. Hoping we'll get more variation in the newer tools. www.geeklawblog.com/2025/08/pabl...
I also think about agency on a spectrum. Agency in all cases doesn’t mean I just open up the aperture of the model and let it run to go do everything on its own. If you think about, again, back to DevTools, I’m an engineer, so this is always my thing to go back to, but if you think about how I might do this in cursor, I don’t just… always vibe out an app and tell, go write this app from scratch. Like sometimes I might say, I want you to help me with this line of code. I want you to help me with this function. I want you to help me with this file, this repo. And as a user, I can scope how much agency the model has in that way. Like I can either put it on a long leash or a short leash. And I think we have done the same thing in CoCounsel. Like deep research is admittedly like a very long leash problem. This is about like discovery and like, I wanna open the aperture of like what this problem might present and I wanna see all the angles of it. Something like a practical law guided workflow, which we just released at ILTA as well, is not as long of a leash. Like it’s intentionally, I’m executing, you know, unemployment policy. Like I won’t. I have a known starting point from practical law about how I should do that and what steps I should follow and what information I need. And I want the agent to follow that rubric, right? And so that would be an example of putting agency on a shorter leash so that we get more control over the process. And so Marlene, that’s kind of how I would think about guardrails is somewhat use case specific in terms of how long do we make this leash for the AI model, depending on. kind how much freedom or appetite for risk maybe we have in the use case.
August 18, 2025 at 4:29 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
I see this happen all the time, where someone sends their AI notetaker to a meeting without getting permission from others in the meeting. Always wondered how that was ok. Well…
On Reddit, users have complained about Otter joining meetings automatically when the service is linked to workplace calendars and recording chats without consent. It's a phenomenon also highlighted by the lawsuit. If someone has an Otter account and joins a virtual meeting, the software will typically ask the meeting's host for permission to record, but it does not by default ask all the other participants.
August 16, 2025 at 3:08 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
Always fun when it’s even about the kind of cancer I had!
AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed, their ability to find tumors dropped by about 20% compared with rates before the tool was ever introduced, according to findings published Wednesday.
August 13, 2025 at 2:02 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
I respect this take, but may I submit for consideration:
A Chinese porcelain soup spoon, white with a blue pattern
July 29, 2025 at 1:51 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
Have we ever gotten this much explanation for legal research AI?
1. Query Conversion - The user's question is sent to the LLM, where it is converted to a Boolean query that contains a number of variations of the query, connected with an OR. If the query is non-English, some of the variations will be in the query language, and the other variations will be in English. 2. Results Retrieval - The Boolean query is sent to CDI to retrieve the results. 3. Re-ranking - The top results (up to 30) are re-ranked using embeddings to identify five sources that best address the user's query. 4. Overview Creation - The top five results are sent to the LLM with the instructions to create the overview with inline references, based on the abstracts. 5. Response Delivery - The overview and sources are returned to the user in the response.
July 25, 2025 at 12:45 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
Update: fat wolf won
An empty middle seat on a plane
July 24, 2025 at 12:59 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
Chat, is this a good sign?
Dedication page of a book I’m reading. It says “To the readers from the days of No Sleep”
July 23, 2025 at 12:30 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
I regret to report that Bluebook rules for state codes have not improved. What year are we supposed to cite for state codes that are not bound?!! Since anything on a .gov website authored by a government is now deemed "official" in Rule 18.2(a)(ii), why bother with bound at all?
Citations to the federal code, whether official or unofficial, do not require a date. When citing a bound volume of the current official or unofficial version of a state code or a federal code (where the date is desired), provide parenthetically the year that appears on the spine of the volume, the year that appears on the title page, or the latest copyright year—in that order of preference. If the date on the spine or title page spans more than one year, give all years covered. If the volume is a replacement of an earlier edition, use the year of the replacement volume, not the year of the original:
July 17, 2025 at 2:50 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
Reason number ♾️ that Duck Duck Go is great. (Yes it *does* feel like I have infinity tabs open, thank you for recognizing me)
Screenshot of the bottom menu on the duck duck go mobile browser. There is an icon to show how many tabs are open and it has an infinity symbol on it.
July 15, 2025 at 3:35 AM
thefordon.bsky.social
If you see this, quote with a robot that isn’t from Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who or Transformers.
The Office two-panel meme format First panel: Michael Scott is standing, behind him Pam touches his back and says “Oh no, your battery fell out” Second panel: Michael, slowing down speech, “I was just learning to love”
July 10, 2025 at 1:49 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
Really disappointing from Law360. Check out this example of a flagged sentence, and tell me this makes any sense at all.
Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one: “It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor.” According to the bias indicator, this sentence is “framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration.” It was best to give more context to “balance the tone.”
July 2, 2025 at 6:56 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
😬😬😎
Arrested development meme Frame 1: WELL DID IT WORK FOR THOSE PEOPLE? Frame 2: NO, IT NEVER DOES, I MEAN, THESE PEOPLE SOMEHOW DELUDE THEMSELVES INTO THINKING IT MIGHT, BUT... Frame 3: BUT IT MIGHT WORK FOR US.
June 29, 2025 at 8:08 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
I get so irrationally angry when I struggle hard to remember a word, and then it’s not even in there.
Screen shot of New York Times spelling bee. I’ve entered the word phthalate, but it is not in the word list
June 20, 2025 at 5:45 PM
thefordon.bsky.social
This session on vibe coding with @seanlovesbooks.bsky.social and @jafrank.bsky.social is already very fun.
Photo of zoom screen. There is a meme with a Lord of the Rings orc (?) that is captioned “The Age of SAAS is Over. The Age of Vibe Coding Has Begun”. Sean and Jonathan’s faces also appear in their Zoom boxes.
June 5, 2025 at 8:05 PM