Oh god, the NYC transit issue is like the largest rancid lasagna of projects - multi-layered, affects tons of people, and so deeply entrenched across legal and technical aspects alike. I've literally lived in an unrecognized breakaway Narco-state of a Narco-state that broke away and has de facto control on the China-Myanmar border, and on the block where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in that boat when he was caught in 2013, but living and commuting in NYC, even as a (entry level, public interest) lawyer who worked in the financial district my final choices were an obviously illegal apartment in Chinatown in a basement with a low, uneven ceiling or a place in Flatbush that literally shared a wall with the tunnel leading into the Parkside Q station, which during weekdays also meant that the B was shaking up the place too so that none of my furniture stayed in place. NYC was great for the friends I had and the stuff to do and even the ultimately soul-crushing job that at least made a difference but man, I'll take the Narco-state-in-a-Narco-state any day now, all things considered.

When it comes to consulting, I don't have direct personal knowledge but from what I gather from cousins I grew up with who did work for McKinsey and smaller, more niche firms, it's really the same issue presented in a different context as the issue of clients picking the lawyer with the best jingle (Cellino and Barnes, anyone?) instead of the actual most competent lawyer, since clients almost never have the frame of reference required to even understand what sort of metrics they should be looking at, and if that data is even available and where to get such data. It's a bit like advanced metrics versus back-of-the-card metrics in baseball. I always practiced defense, never civil work (admin/criminal only), and in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions where the need was greatest and resources lacking. In part it's because I find IP work distasteful and frequently petty, even though it was a subject matter I was well versed in enough to get offers of employment at even though I literally never wrote for law review and interned only in criminal defense. With that comes with the territory where essentially by the time I got my limited license right after my second year's finals ended I was already racking up bar complaints and paid internship offers at about the same rate, since other attorneys noticed really quickly that I had a useful affinity with tech generally but especially in spotting evidentiary bullshit in computer crime prosecutions and those involving cell phone forensics. It didn't hurt that the first time I sat at the attorney's table in a felony trial I had the facebook data of every juror in the pool that was public - and in 2012 just about everything was public - and managed to get a hung jury, which just ended up with the prosecutor waiting until I was back in class to do the retrial on the same evidence and ending up with a first degree murder conviction. Literally all I did was focus on using preemptory challenges on those who are openly either related to, friends with, or had positive comments about the police who nevertheless claim to be impartial - not exactly rocket science or learning Brainfuck. By the time I graduated I had recorded a ridiculous number of internship/externship hours, managed to get several CFAA counts dropped on computer crime related cases only to have the jury convict on wire fraud anyway, and got not-guilty verdicts in around 10% of all cases that did go to trial, which was followed by sometimes weekly bar complaints filed against my supervisor and I for not being able to use black magic to jedi mindtrick the jury or something. If this was baseball, I'd have a 1-10 record but witha BABIP of .800 or something since before 2021, defending against a CFAA criminal charge was ludicrously difficult thanks to the law being drafted pre-internet by senators who watched Wargames starring Matthew Broderick, which was also released half a decade before I was born. One can never tell if the police and prosecutor really didn't understand technology or were just intentionally screwing with the court by presenting gibberish evidence and hiring incredibly incompetent experts, but at one point during cross I realized that the police officer testifying did not understand DHCP and so the entire basis for attribution was based on an assumption that open hotspots assigned permanent IPs to clients connecting, full stop. We lost the case anyway since wire fraud was an even easier charge to convict on. Even today, just reading dockets and filings and receiving the occasional (and always baseless) DMCA notice by way of Github, it appears that not only are prosecutors hiring experts without expertise, but in civil cases, large companies - particularly in DMCA related litigation - are hiring attorneys who don't know how CDNs work at all and are conducting ridiculous direct and cross examinations or making nonsensical jurisdictional claims that actually end up undermining their own cases. Since the standard for jurisdiction is purposeful availment of service within the jurisdiction, basing jurisdiction on geolocating a CDN IP from your office will obviously come back with one in the US, even though the defendant, who is almost always overseas, would have the exact opposite view if they showed up in court to defend themselves, not to mention that since CDNs aren't hosting the content through intentional selection of server location but a caching-based automated process, every time the court goes in depth on the meaning of purposeful availment, the purported copyright holder is essentially sabotaging the viability of their future cases while arguing to nobody currently.

Hell, I got a DMCA notice from a white shoe fancy IP firm that predicated its takedown notice on my use of the word "scrape" which then proceeds to misstate the fact, the law, and showed blatant lack of knowledge of even the word "hosting". For the record, "scrape" does not have a legal definition under the cited statute and there's no case law in either jurisdiction that would make the word itself the basis for a claim of infringement per se. Actually, I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at the code I wrote and may have even inadvertently claimed copyright on something they only had a license to, while another part of the claim may be an admission of a prima facie violation of the CFAA as interpreted post van Buren. Since the code in the repo is meant to fix the shitty app they bought that basically was impossible to use, I'm not counter-noticing it officially since the remedy for that is just restoring the repo and if they want their paying customers to not be able to use functionality they paid for, so be it. But if a company the size of the NY Times is able to hire legal representation that is so incompetent to a degree where I've seen pro se petitions by prisoners that are better informed than the notice that certainly was billed at a rate that cost about as much the entire misdemeanor representation of a low level assault charge that goes to trial, clearly there wasn't anything close to oversight or due diligence applied. I doubt any attorney would risk their bar card to defraud the court in such a blatant manner, I can only surmise that it's incompetence, aided by the fact that lawyers who code and know the specific law and have specific experience with the law is likely a small group, but I know personally some very competent and in fact some very good IP attorneys in NYC. But if a corporation this size can't adequately figure out who's actually good at what they purport to do, I guess it's many times harder for the individual.

(Although really it's not. Consults are typically free, and simply asking every attorney you consult who they'd hire if they're in your shoes and crowdsource those actually practicing is usually enough to figure out who to hire)