Fifteen years ago yesterday, frustrated that a legal-media conglomerate had put a decade of my articles behind a paywall, I started Ball in Your Court. From that christening to this quinceañera, I’ve penned 283 posts viewed 690,650 times. More than 2,000 people subscribe to receive them. I’m grateful to everyone who tolerates the updates and indebted to the roughly half who take the time to click through.

The numbers are gratifying, but the real reward has been hearing from readers—especially when you correct me, challenge me or tell me that something here helped you do the work better. I started the blog to share what I had learned; fifteen years later, I’ve learned at least as much from those who read it.

For reasons I can’t fathom, more than 6,000 people read my post of August 28, 2024 on the day it appeared. The key takeaway from that short post about linked attachments was: “We should never guess at what we can readily measure.”

For reasons I fully fathom, my most visited post was one published a year ago this week, marking the death of EDRM’s Kaylee Walstad. It has been a year of missing her every day. If you knew Kaylee, please pause a moment to remember her.

I christened this blog thusly:

The exabytes of digital information streaming about us today are rich rivers of evidence that will help us find the truth and move us to do justice more swiftly, more economically and more honorably than ever before. It will require every litigator to master new skills and tools, and alter the approaches and attitudes we bring to the adversarial process. We must reinvent ourselves to master modern evidence or be content with a justice system that best serves the well-heeled and the corrupt. The path to justice is paved with competent evidence and trod by counsel competent in its use.

I wrote that years before AI and deepfakes entered the conversation. It is truer now, and its mandate more compelling, when the justice system—and the Department of Justice—is deeply in thrall to the well-heeled and the corrupt.

AI can amplify competence, but it also allows anyone to feign it. Now, more than ever, we must continually reinvent ourselves to master modern evidence and be prepared to expose the fake and the fabulous.