INSIGHT: How Covid-19 Changed the Future of Litigation

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Covid-19 is proving to be the impetus the legal industry needed to embrace remote technologies, Merchant & Gould attorneys write. They look at how law firms are adjusting to new technologies now and how courts may adopt new technologies going forward.

In law firms, one might guess the graduation year of attorneys based only on the technologies employed in their practices.

Lawyers graduating in the last decade may have never even seen a dictaphone in person or have experienced paper cuts from thumbing through thousands of paper documents to prepare them for production in litigation. Only recently did a small number of litigators begin using tablets instead of paper documents in depositions. Nearly all litigators firmly believed it was not possible to effectively conduct a deposition or hearing remotely.

But the Covid-19 pandemic forced change in an age-old profession, nearly overnight. As courthouses around the country continue trials and hearings, and even close completely, courts and attorneys alike have been forced to adopt new technologies at every stage of proceedings.

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Significant Advances in Two of the Hardest to Treat Cancers

drugs

Lung cancer and melanoma are among the hardest cancers to treat.

Using two opposite strategies, one focused and one broad, scientists say they have made progress in taming two of the most intractable types of cancer.   The focused approach shrank tumors significantly in a majority of patients with advanced lung cancer marked by a specific genetic abnormality.

 

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Breast Cancer Vaccine Trials to Start on Women Within One Year

vaccine

Breast cancer vaccine successful in mice, trials to start on humans in just a year.

American scientists say they have developed a vaccine which has prevented breast cancer from developing in mice.  The researchers – whose findings are published in the journal, Nature Medicine – are now planning to conduct trials of the drug in humans.

 

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Electrical Stimulation Through The Spinal Cord May Ease Parkinson’s Symptoms

Electrical Stimulation Through The Spinal Cord May Ease Parkinson’s Symptoms

Neural activity in the brain of a Parkinsonian rat before (top) and after (bottom) electrical stimulation is applied to its spinal cord.  

Delivering electrical stimulation to the spinal cord through tiny, platinum electrodes could ease the severe motor deficits of Parkinson’s disease as effectively as a much more intrusive procedure currently in clinical use, according to a new study in rodents. If the findings are confirmed in humans, scientists say, the procedure could dramatically improve treatment for the disease by making electrical therapies safer and more broadly available.

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Robotic System That Will Operate On A Beating Heart

Robotic System That Will Operate On A Beating Heart 

This device lets surgeons attach small anchors to tissue inside a beating heart by compensating for the heart’s movement. 

Fixing the heart is hard. Certain procedures have to be performed on a stationary organ, so the heart is stopped and the patient put on a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. But stopping the heart increases the risk of brain damage. Now researchers at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston are testing a robotic system that could help surgeons perform a common valve repair while the heart beats on. The system uses 3-D ultrasound images to predict and compensate for the motion of the heart so that the surgeon can work on a patient’s mitral valve as it moves.

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Improved Retinal Implant Stimulates Neurons To Restore Sight

Improved Retinal Implant Stimulates Neurons To Restore Sight 
A new retinal implant sits mostly outside the eye. 

For many blind or partially sighted people, implants that stimulate healthy nerve cells connected to their retinas could help restore some normal vision. Researchers have been working on such implants since the 1980s but with only limited success. A major hurdle is making an implant that can stay in the eye for years without declining in performance or causing inflammation.

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Smoother Steering When Driver’s Fix Gaze On Specific Targets

Smoother Steering When Driver’s Fix Gaze On Specific Targets 

 This video frame shows the blue target bar positioned on the tangent point — the point at which the edge line on a road seems to begin changing direction — as the road curves to the left.

A study recently published in ARVO’s online Journal of Vision may inform the next generation of in-car driving assistance systems. New research finds that when drivers fix their gaze on specific targets placed strategically along a curve, their steering is smoother and more stable than it is in normal conditions.

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Artificial Corneas

Artificial Corneas 

 Artificial Cornea

Researchers at Stanford University may have just gotten us one step closer to creating a cyborg. They’ve developed a new kind of artificial cornea, one that’s “showing promise” in animal studies and could eliminate the need for cornea transplants completely.

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