case study carla's story

Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Carla's Story:A Case Study - Coggle Diagram

• 3 more items...
• Carla given tPA and then started on Heparin and Coumadin
• US completed in ED, blood clot found
• Staff refused to account for circumstances and cancel US
• US scheduled without consultation with patient for inconvenient time and location - nurse did not consult patient about preferences or transportation

Sign up for your FREE e-newsletter

You’ll regularly recieve powerful strategies for personal development, tips to improve the growth of your counselling practice, the latest industry news and much more.

We’ll keep your information private and never sell, rent, trade or share it with any other organisation. And you can cancel anytime.

Coping Effectively with Change: Carla’s Case Study

Carla is a 37 year old woman who works as a manager in a large engineering firm. She is married with two children a boy aged 10 (Carlos) and girl aged 8 (Anna). Her husband Rodrigo is great with the kids and very devoted and loving to Carla but he has recently been laid off from work (clothing factory supervisor) because the company became liquidated and folded.

Although her job is well paid, Carla has been very worried about finances, the mortgage and having enough money to pay for all of the bills such as council rates, telephone and electricity bills, school fees, food, clothes and fuel for the two cars. There has been a bit of tension lately since Rodrigo lost his job and both Carla and Rodrigo have had some heated verbal exchanges. Carla realises that she is under a lot of pressure and has sought the help of a counsellor to see what can be done with her circumstances.

The counsellor has been great because Carla can get lots of feelings and frustrations off her chest and is able to get some really pragmatic ideas about getting support. Carla also has a very supportive family and her father has stated that he will help them out financially for the time being. Carla also has a great bunch of girlfriends that she talks to and has coffee with on a regular basis and a couple of mothers whose kids go to the same school as Carlos and Anna have helped out with transport to and from school.

This has relieved Carla’s anxiety, but she knows that she will need a longer term plan and that Rodrigo is going to have to help. Rodrigo has been trying to get another job, but he may have to travel to another suburb much further away where there is some work vacancies. He has applied for two positions and has been asked to come in for an interview soon so he is focused and a bit on edge but is quietly confident he has the experience and knowledge to be successful.

Carla and Rodrigo have been to see their accountant so that they can sort out a plan to ease their financial burden and whilst money is tight, they can see that they will be able to cope, especially with her father’s offer of support. Carla continues to go to the gym in the mornings and to book club every second Saturday which she enjoys.

What can we make of Carla’s story?

The change in circumstances following her husband’s loss of his job created considerable stress for Carla in the face of mounting bills and family tension testing her relationship with Rodrigo. Carla to her credit could understand the nature of this change and looked for ways to cope and people to talk to about her dilemma. Carla has strong family and social supports and this has enabled her to take control and seek out solutions to her problems.

She has sought the help of her father and this has been very positive. She realises that this is not going to be a permanent solution and with Rodrigo they have sought out financial planning advice and help and have been able to ascertain that with some belt tightening in some areas they will be financially okay.

Carla also realised that there was tension between her and Rodrigo and she sought the help of a professional counsellor. She has been able to express her fears and frustrations which have greatly relieved her anxiety and she realises that she needed to let off some steam. Carla also has some great girlfriends who have also given her lots of emotional and practical support. Carla has taken comfort in the fact that Rodrigo is doing a great job caring for the kids when her work commitments become too great under the stress.

Carla has not given up her activities such as the gym and book club and this has helped her to relax a bit.

• February 8, 2008
• No Comments
• Change , Coping Skills , Mindsets , Resilience , Transitions
• Lifespan Development , Relationship & Families , Stress Management

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Net Price Calculator
• Refer a Friend
• Schedule A Massage

Carla’s Story: A Working Mom Goes Back to School

Carla Desrouleaux had an uphill battle to become a surgical technician. “Being at Swedish Institute was one of the main places to learn… about balancing life and school and family all at once.” As a mom to two children working as a medical assistant at hospitals across the city, Carla knew she wanted more for herself and her family.  

Starting part-time at Swedish Institute in October of 2020, Carla graduated from Swedish Institute as a Certified Surgical Technologist (CST) in December of 2023. This is the story of how going back to school and raising a family is an achievable goal for a working mom.  

Going to School as a Working Mom

Many prospective students worry about balancing their home life and responsibilities with their studies. Swedish Institute has programs and schedules that allow students to attend classes that work on timelines built for busy individuals. Our admissions program works with students to build schedules that make sense for their needs, and our school offers support to help students prepare for busy schedules.

Carla’s Journey  

Carla worked as a medical assistant at an esthetics clinic before the pandemic when she realized she wanted a change. “I was dealing with the surgeons, and I couldn’t do anymore, but I wanted to keep working harder and get to a higher level.” This time spent with surgeons inspired Carla to return to school to become a CST. However, the mother of two still needed to earn money and raise a family while going to school. “Sending my kids to school and then focusing on my own education was tough, but it worked out in the end.”  

Carla loved helping people, and doing clinicals at Kings County Hospital gave her even more appreciation for the work. She found pride in every kind of surgery she worked on, but one stood out in particular: Labor and Delivery. But at the end of the day, every surgery mattered to Carla, and her work was always crucial .      

Carla is another great Swedish Institute success story, and her work has paid off. In March 2024, Carla began a job at Brookdale Hospital, which she found with help from Career Services Director Richard Gardner. “He sent me to multiple interviews to ensure I’d find a job soon.”  

One of Carla’s proudest moments was attending her graduation ceremony last year, where her nine-year-old son watched his mother walk across the podium and receive a diploma. “It made him realize he could do the same in the future.”  

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The case of Carla: Dilemmas of helpingall students to understand science

2002, Science Education

Related Papers

Kennedy Onyancha

Art Journal-College Art Association

Olivia Gude

Linguistics and Education

Gordon Wells

Rakesh Kumar

Learners do not wait for adults to help them in coming up with some answers, they just put their best efforts to understand the physical and natural world. Many a times these are not the conceptions that scientific community accepts as efficate ones. These OTHER CONCEPTIONS are the issue that had been challenging contemporary understanding on how should we design teaching-learning processes in science. Different researches show that Alternative Frameworks are formed in both formal and informal settings that are difficult to understand in discontinuity from each other. This generates the need to understand science learning contexts in an integrated form from multiple dimensions. In the present study the science learning context had been explored while the topic/area of explorations was 'TRANSPARENCY OF OBJECTS'. The study reveals that all learners learnt easily and acquired more knowledge by doing the activities and science experiments; They also acquired right knowledge in a right way; Many learners referred to many other references also talked to parents; consulted reference books; learners searched internet to know more about types of object; learners planned to get together in a group and talk further on the problems & issues related to subject. More exploration of the learners' questions like,-"What are transparent and translucent objects? What can we do through opaque objects? What are objects and where are they found? How does the size of a shadow vary?" may be needed. The study presents many diagrams made by the learners. These type of diagrams can be considered by the teacher to be starting point of their explorations of the learners' Alternative Frameworks.

Charoula Angeli

Oskar Lindwall

Science Education

Cedric Linder

Joel Kuipers

Chemistry Teacher International

Larissa Wellhöfer

Information literacy is increasingly acknowledged as a contextual and social practice in teaching and research and can be beneficial to further our understanding of laboratory learning. However, there is a need for in-depth insight into the lived information practice in chemistry to develop contextualized information literacy instruction. This work explores the negotiation of information between beginners and experienced members of the chemistry community in a problem-based beginner laboratory. To this end, we conducted a qualitative study following the documentary method by audio-recording the students’ first lab session on-site. The reconstruction of the students’ information practice shows how beginners learn about group-specific knowledge through participation. The results highlight the importance of corporeal information to give meaning to textual and social information in the chemistry laboratory. Exemplified by the concept of acidification, our findings show how social and te...

Richard Allington

This 3tudy was designed to determine whether subjects who received one of three treatments of color cups in an instructional program differed significantly on three learning tasks. Subjects were randomly selected from the kindergarten populaticns of two Michigan public schools and were assigned to one of three treatment groups. Eight letter-like figures were presented to the 102 subjects in one of the three treatments: no color, maximum color, and maximum color added and then vanished. Subjects were pretested on the ability to match the figures to form and to match the figures from memory. Following the completion of a teaching sequence, subjects were posttested on the ability to match the figures to form, tc match the figures from memory, and to associate a meaningless trigram with each figure. The results indicated that the vanished color treatment was significantly better than the no-color treatment. From the results it was concluded that the vanished color treatment enhanced the...

RELATED PAPERS

Luiz Gustavo Lopes

Roma Universalis. L'impero e la dinastia venuta dall'Africa

Clementina Panella

Syahrial Yudistira

Kunthi Pathmaraj

Rakan Rashid

Advanced Technologies

Annales Françaises d'Anesthésie et de Réanimation

Musa A. Sesay

Applied Ergonomics

Clifford Gross

Maher Tadros

ariyo adanikin

Dominique Pantaloni

Ulrich Laaser

Cogent Public Health

Kelvin Mwangilwa

Earth and Planetary Science Letters

Youichiro Takada

Munispace – čítárna Masarykovy univerzity

Zuzana hlavonova

Michael Carper

The Journal of Infectious Diseases

Patricia Janssen

Biodiversitas Journal of Biological Diversity

Ali Bin Abithalib Salman

Thư Nguyễn Thị Minh

The Turkish journal of pediatrics

Mehmet Gündüz

Fatma Al-Qudsi

Tarjih Tropical Livestock Journal

Bahri Syamsuryadi

Companion Proceedings of the XIV Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web - WebMedia '08

Gabriel Schoma Antonio

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

How Carla boosted customer satisfaction and saved 8 hours per week with Atlar

"Partnering with Atlar has been a game-changer for Carla, allowing us to solve critical payment and treasury challenges that prevented us from providing the best possible buying experience. We're excited to continue working together to streamline our treasury infrastructure."

THE CHALLENGE

Legacy bank systems that put the brakes on both internal processes and the customer experience

The experience of buying an electric car online, from payment to delivery, is all-important for Carla's team. Their mission is to make it as easy as buying clothes online, and the team saw that efficiently moving and managing money behind-the-scenes is a key enabler for this. Carla’s critical treasury and payment operations include:

• Collecting and reconciling incoming payments
• Monitoring bank statements for incoming transfers to manage inventory

A big headache for Carla's operations team was their inability to access transaction data in real time, since the legacy bank interfaces they relied on didn't allow it. Team members had to manually log into online bank portals and check whether specific payments had been credited to their accounts line-by-line. Unsurprisingly this process resulted in delayed payment notifications – delays that meant customers often had to wait additional days to receive their cars.

Carla’s business model is margin-based, as opposed to being credit-driven, and to continuously optimize inventory the team needed an overview of incoming and outgoing money flows across all banks. Not being able to retrieve cash flow data programmatically, in real time, and access it in one central place was a big miss. For the finance team, using multiple bank interfaces meant reconciliation was inevitably a highly manual process.

For a rapidly growing scale-up like Carla, having to divert engineering resources to building direct bank connections and maintaining an internal back-office system was an increasingly tough pill to swallow. Instead the Carla team committed to finding a future-proof solution that would integrate with their existing ecommerce platform.

THE SOLUTION

Fully automated liquidity monitoring and faster money movement

Carla partnered with Atlar to leverage pre-existing bank connections, monitor cash flow data in real time, and automate payment status tracking and notifications. The engineering team integrated the Atlar API within two weeks of signing the contract – delivering time-savings for the broader company and an improved customer experience overnight.

Carla's operations team are now immediately notified as soon as a payment is credited to one of their accounts with the transaction automatically matched to the underlying order. This means there's no need to continuously monitor bank portals for new payments and customer orders can be confirmed faster.

The Carla team went one step further in streamlining the customer experience. Using Atlar's transaction webhooks, Carla built a workflow whereby upon receiving a payment the car is automatically approved for delivery and a notification is sent simultaneously to the buyer. Today 100% of Carla's customers are notified when their order is confirmed in real time – and the cars themselves are delivered days earlier in some cases.

These efficiency gains extended to internal processes too. Carla's finance team now use the Atlar dashboard to monitor liquidity across banks, gaining a level of visibility over real-time cash inflows and outflows that would previously have taken hours. Similarly, since consolidated bank data is now piped into their internal system in real time, they could build ledger logic to automatically reconcile payments and track outstanding balances for partially paid invoices.

Streamlined processes that drive ongoing customer satisfaction gains

The Carla team isn't short of ambition – they're set on becoming a European category leader in electric vehicles and are on course to do exactly that. They needed a partner that was equally agile and could support them in quickly scaling their treasury infrastructure.

The partnership already began delivering results in a few short weeks with faster internal processes leading directly to an improved experience and higher customer satisfaction scores.

"The fact that Atlar came pre-integrated with our banks, could offer real-time cash flow monitoring, and automated our payment notifications has saved us both time and engineering resources while improving customer satisfaction," said Mustafa. "We're excited to continue working with the Atlar team."

If complex payment and treasury operations are slowing your team down, book a demo and take the Atlar platform for a 30-minute test drive yourself.

Most recent

Get started See a demo

Discover the Atlar platform for yourself. Enter your email to get started.

Brick by Brick: A Case Study on LEGO’s Culture of Innovation

by Carla Johnson

December 6, 2022

How does a company swing from scrapping together toys from actual scraps in the Great Depression to becoming a household name to nearly filing for bankruptcy to being one of history’s greatest innovation superstars?

By being really good at building, and rebuilding, one brick at a time.

I’m talking, of course, about LEGO . 

LEGO wasn’t always an innovation success story. Like all large companies, they’ve gone through more than a few ups and downs. But somehow they always managed to turn things around.

Let’s take a look at how they consistently innovated their way into the hearts of kids and adults alike.

How LEGO built itself from nothing

LEGO bricks actually began as scraps of wood in 1932 by Danish woodworker Ole Kirk Kristiansen. Before making toys, he made practical objects like ladders, ironing boards, and farm equipment. The Great Depression made work scarce, so he switched to making toys since scraps were easier to come by than large bits of lumber. But even resourcefulness and innovation didn’t immediately save him. People considered toys a luxury in the Depression, and many of the folks in town couldn’t afford them. Ole often traded toys for food just to survive. 

Fast forward to the 1940s and when the Nazis occupied Denmark. Not only was lumber crazy expensive, but Ole’s workshop also caught fire, and he lost his entire inventory and blueprints.

He managed to hold on to the business until the early 1950s when he met his next roadblock. World War II had made lumber nearly impossible for Ole to get his hands on. Instead, he used a new material: plastic. This is when he developed the patented interlocking system that made the LEGO bricks famously stackable.

LEGOs became wildly successful shortly after.

Success meets a brick wall

By the 1990s, LEGO’s popularity took a hit. The digital era began eeking its way into kids’ games and quickly caught the eyes of the brand’s curious customers. Nintendo was the sexy new stud on the block. (Yes, I’m absolutely going to fit in as many puns as I can.) Small toy shops closed their doors thanks to heavy competition from big box stores like Toys ‘R Us.

LEGO tried to keep up with the new trends in toymaking, even getting into the video game business to keep up with Nintendo. But it quickly became a case of trying too many things, getting away from its core business, and stretching itself too thin.

Teetering on the edge, LEGO barely avoided bankruptcy in the early 2000s. But a few emergency loans kept it afloat long enough to simplify its business and get back to its roots. By chasing every trend in the world of toys, LEGO had lost sight of what they were good at. They recentered their business on their iconic building sets, launching franchise sets including Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones , and many other cult favorites.

That one move saved the company.

More renovations

The success of LEGO franchise sets gave the company enough liquidity to experiment again. But this time, they tried something they hadn’t done in years: openly accepting feedback from their fans. The relationship between customers and small toy shop owners used to be their main avenue for customer feedback. But thanks to competition from big box stores, small toy shops were closing and that invaluable feedback was lost. Until 1998.

In 1998, LEGO launched the Mindstorms robotics kits, a combination of hardware and software that let fans build robots using the iconic LEGO bricks. Just hours after the launch, thousands of hackers hijacked the software to make unauthorized modifications that gave new functions to the robots.

LEGO had a choice: prosecute the hackers… or embrace them.

LEGO recognized that they could collaborate with fans for feedback, and that would turn out to be invaluable.

They took a gamble and it paid off. Big time.

Using an open innovation strategy, LEGO re-launched the Mindstorms NXT series in 2006 which went on to become one of their biggest successes of all time. Why? They co-created with their customers.

LEGO used the feedback ecosystem they developed around the Mindstorms products as a model to create their now-famous culture of innovation. They started the LEGO Ambassador Program, which allowed fans to engage with the company around its kits. This continuous feedback loop gave LEGO tons of new ideas and partnerships, while making fans key decision-makers in the process.

Around the same time, LEGO started the crowdsourcing platform LEGO Ideas . The platform encourages fans to submit their ideas, and fellow fans can vote on which products they’d like to see put into production. Once an idea hits 10,000 votes, it moves on to a LEGO review board. If selected, the original creator receives 1% of the product’s revenue.

Building on success

Using feedback from their fans, LEGO consistently churns out great idea after great idea. Go to their website and, besides ordering products, you can build things, share them with friends, and watch videos. Five times a year they publish a magazine that kids go crazy over. They produced Beyond the Brick: A LEGO Brickumentary – a documentary for adult fans of LEGO bricks. They’ve released Hollywood feature films that grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Their YouTube channel has millions of subscribers. They have eight amuse ment parks . There’s even a game you can download from the app store.

All from a company that sells little rectangular pieces of plastic.

LEGO’s 4 building blocks of success

Not every company has the massive innovation budget of LEGO, or the decades of experience as an industry giant, or the rabid (and vocal) fan base. So what are some lessons any company can learn from LEGO’s giant success?

1) Respect why your customers fell in love with you in the first place

LEGO became famous for its iconic bricks. But over the years, chasing too many trends drove them away from their core business model. While sometimes shifting the entire company makes sense – especially when technology deems old product lines extinct – in LEGO’s case, it was unnecessary. It wasn’t until they recommitted to their building sets in the early 2000s that LEGO was able to become an innovation legend.

2) Listen to your customers, including your biggest critics

From bringing hackers on board in the 90s to LEGO Ambassadors to crowdsourcing ideas, LEGO became a model for open innovation. The constant feedback loop with their fans tuned LEGO into exactly what their customers wanted and sparked endless ideas. It doesn’t have to be complicated. If you listen to your customers, they’ll tell you what they want to buy.

3) Develop complementary offerings instead of reinventing the wheel

LEGO only really started becoming the innovation darling we know today once they started listening to their customers. And what did their fans want? More ways to enjoy LEGOs! From movies to theme parks, LEGO created tons of new ways to enjoy the brand that didn’t compete with their core products. And that last part is key. Not only are you competing with your rivals, but your company might also just be competing with itself.

4) Create a culture of innovation

Google’s corporate campus has nothing on LEGO’s. Little toy bricks are everywhere . LEGO encourages all its employees to play regularly and submit ideas. So not only do they source ideas from their fans, but from everyone at the company, as well. From Frank in Accounting to Nadia in HR, everyone is invited to make the company better.

Want to know more about how to create a culture of innovation like LEGO? Check out:

The Museum of Play: The Connection Between Play and Innovation

How to Create a Culture of Innovation

Why Innovation is Your Competitive Advantage

How to Innovate

Photo credit: Jason Leung via Unsplash

About Carla

Carla Johnson helps leaders who are often paralyzed by traditional thinking. They suffer from slow growth, an eroding competitive advantage, low employee engagement, and depleted investor confidence. Their teams lack purpose and progress and constantly battle a resistance to change and new ideas.

As the world’s leading innovation architect, Carla’s spent 20 years helping leaders shatter limits and discover undiscovered possibilities. Through years of research, she’s developed a simple, scalable 5-step process that teaches people how to consistently produce inspired ideas that lead to uncommon outcomes.

A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

• High-Impact Prevention
• Case Studies
• National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention

High-Impact Prevention Case Studies

At a glance.

See examples of High-Impact Prevention success stories, and how proven, cost-effective, and scalable interventions are implemented. This approach aims to prevent the greatest amount of infections or for reducing disparities, given available resources.

Success stories

• Case Study: Preventing Antibiotic-Resistant Gonorrhea by Changing Treatment Guidelines and Educating Health Care Providers | CDC
• Case Study: Universal Hepatitis C Screening Among Adults and Treatment for Hepatitis C Virus Infection | CDC
• Case Study: HIV Screening and Testing | CDC
• Case Study: A Promising HIP Intervention — Electronic Directly Observed Therapy for Active TB Disease | CDC

High-Impact Prevention is a cost-effective, proven, scalable public health approach that prevents new infections, saves life-years, and reduces disparities.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Study Suggests Genetics as a Cause, Not Just a Risk, for Some Alzheimer’s

People with two copies of the gene variant APOE4 are almost certain to get Alzheimer’s, say researchers, who proposed a framework under which such patients could be diagnosed years before symptoms.

By Pam Belluck

Scientists are proposing a new way of understanding the genetics of Alzheimer’s that would mean that up to a fifth of patients would be considered to have a genetically caused form of the disease.

Currently, the vast majority of Alzheimer’s cases do not have a clearly identified cause. The new designation, proposed in a study published Monday, could broaden the scope of efforts to develop treatments, including gene therapy, and affect the design of clinical trials.

It could also mean that hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone could, if they chose, receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s before developing any symptoms of cognitive decline, although there currently are no treatments for people at that stage.

The new classification would make this type of Alzheimer’s one of the most common genetic disorders in the world, medical experts said.

“This reconceptualization that we’re proposing affects not a small minority of people,” said Dr. Juan Fortea, an author of the study and the director of the Sant Pau Memory Unit in Barcelona, Spain. “Sometimes we say that we don’t know the cause of Alzheimer’s disease,” but, he said, this would mean that about 15 to 20 percent of cases “can be tracked back to a cause, and the cause is in the genes.”

The idea involves a gene variant called APOE4. Scientists have long known that inheriting one copy of the variant increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, and that people with two copies, inherited from each parent, have vastly increased risk.

The new study , published in the journal Nature Medicine, analyzed data from over 500 people with two copies of APOE4, a significantly larger pool than in previous studies. The researchers found that almost all of those patients developed the biological pathology of Alzheimer’s, and the authors say that two copies of APOE4 should now be considered a cause of Alzheimer’s — not simply a risk factor.

The patients also developed Alzheimer’s pathology relatively young, the study found. By age 55, over 95 percent had biological markers associated with the disease. By 65, almost all had abnormal levels of a protein called amyloid that forms plaques in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s. And many started developing symptoms of cognitive decline at age 65, younger than most people without the APOE4 variant.

“The critical thing is that these individuals are often symptomatic 10 years earlier than other forms of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Reisa Sperling, a neurologist at Mass General Brigham in Boston and an author of the study.

She added, “By the time they are picked up and clinically diagnosed, because they’re often younger, they have more pathology.”

People with two copies, known as APOE4 homozygotes, make up 2 to 3 percent of the general population, but are an estimated 15 to 20 percent of people with Alzheimer’s dementia, experts said. People with one copy make up about 15 to 25 percent of the general population, and about 50 percent of Alzheimer’s dementia patients.

The most common variant is called APOE3, which seems to have a neutral effect on Alzheimer’s risk. About 75 percent of the general population has one copy of APOE3, and more than half of the general population has two copies.

Alzheimer’s experts not involved in the study said classifying the two-copy condition as genetically determined Alzheimer’s could have significant implications, including encouraging drug development beyond the field’s recent major focus on treatments that target and reduce amyloid.

Dr. Samuel Gandy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Mount Sinai in New York, who was not involved in the study, said that patients with two copies of APOE4 faced much higher safety risks from anti-amyloid drugs.

When the Food and Drug Administration approved the anti-amyloid drug Leqembi last year, it required a black-box warning on the label saying that the medication can cause “serious and life-threatening events” such as swelling and bleeding in the brain, especially for people with two copies of APOE4. Some treatment centers decided not to offer Leqembi, an intravenous infusion, to such patients.

Dr. Gandy and other experts said that classifying these patients as having a distinct genetic form of Alzheimer’s would galvanize interest in developing drugs that are safe and effective for them and add urgency to current efforts to prevent cognitive decline in people who do not yet have symptoms.

“Rather than say we have nothing for you, let’s look for a trial,” Dr. Gandy said, adding that such patients should be included in trials at younger ages, given how early their pathology starts.

Besides trying to develop drugs, some researchers are exploring gene editing to transform APOE4 into a variant called APOE2, which appears to protect against Alzheimer’s. Another gene-therapy approach being studied involves injecting APOE2 into patients’ brains.

The new study had some limitations, including a lack of diversity that might make the findings less generalizable. Most patients in the study had European ancestry. While two copies of APOE4 also greatly increase Alzheimer’s risk in other ethnicities, the risk levels differ, said Dr. Michael Greicius, a neurologist at Stanford University School of Medicine who was not involved in the research.

“One important argument against their interpretation is that the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in APOE4 homozygotes varies substantially across different genetic ancestries,” said Dr. Greicius, who cowrote a study that found that white people with two copies of APOE4 had 13 times the risk of white people with two copies of APOE3, while Black people with two copies of APOE4 had 6.5 times the risk of Black people with two copies of APOE3.

“This has critical implications when counseling patients about their ancestry-informed genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” he said, “and it also speaks to some yet-to-be-discovered genetics and biology that presumably drive this massive difference in risk.”

Under the current genetic understanding of Alzheimer’s, less than 2 percent of cases are considered genetically caused. Some of those patients inherited a mutation in one of three genes and can develop symptoms as early as their 30s or 40s. Others are people with Down syndrome, who have three copies of a chromosome containing a protein that often leads to what is called Down syndrome-associated Alzheimer’s disease .

Dr. Sperling said the genetic alterations in those cases are believed to fuel buildup of amyloid, while APOE4 is believed to interfere with clearing amyloid buildup.

Under the researchers’ proposal, having one copy of APOE4 would continue to be considered a risk factor, not enough to cause Alzheimer’s, Dr. Fortea said. It is unusual for diseases to follow that genetic pattern, called “semidominance,” with two copies of a variant causing the disease, but one copy only increasing risk, experts said.

The new recommendation will prompt questions about whether people should get tested to determine if they have the APOE4 variant.

Dr. Greicius said that until there were treatments for people with two copies of APOE4 or trials of therapies to prevent them from developing dementia, “My recommendation is if you don’t have symptoms, you should definitely not figure out your APOE status.”

He added, “It will only cause grief at this point.”

Finding ways to help these patients cannot come soon enough, Dr. Sperling said, adding, “These individuals are desperate, they’ve seen it in both of their parents often and really need therapies.”

Pam Belluck is a health and science reporter, covering a range of subjects, including reproductive health, long Covid, brain science, neurological disorders, mental health and genetics. More about Pam Belluck

The Fight Against Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, but much remains unknown about this daunting disease..

How is Alzheimer’s diagnosed? What causes Alzheimer’s? We answered some common questions .

A study suggests that genetics can be a cause of Alzheimer’s , not just a risk, raising the prospect of diagnosis years before symptoms appear.

Determining whether someone has Alzheimer’s usually requires an extended diagnostic process . But new criteria could lead to a diagnosis on the basis of a simple blood test .

The F.D.A. has given full approval to the Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi. Here is what to know about i t.

Alzheimer’s can make communicating difficult. We asked experts for tips on how to talk to someone with the disease .

Published: 5 April 2024 Contributors: Tim Mucci, Cole Stryker

Big data analytics refers to the systematic processing and analysis of large amounts of data and complex data sets, known as big data, to extract valuable insights. Big data analytics allows for the uncovering of trends, patterns and correlations in large amounts of raw data to help analysts make data-informed decisions. This process allows organizations to leverage the exponentially growing data generated from diverse sources, including internet-of-things (IoT) sensors, social media, financial transactions and smart devices to derive actionable intelligence through advanced analytic techniques.

In the early 2000s, advances in software and hardware capabilities made it possible for organizations to collect and handle large amounts of unstructured data. With this explosion of useful data, open-source communities developed big data frameworks to store and process this data. These frameworks are used for distributed storage and processing of large data sets across a network of computers. Along with additional tools and libraries, big data frameworks can be used for:

• Predictive modeling by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and statistical algorithms
• Statistical analysis for in-depth data exploration and to uncover hidden patterns
• What-if analysis to simulate different scenarios and explore potential outcomes
• Processing diverse data sets, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from various sources.

Four main data analysis methods  – descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive  – are used to uncover insights and patterns within an organization's data. These methods facilitate a deeper understanding of market trends, customer preferences and other important business metrics.

IBM named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Augmented Data Quality Solutions.

Structured vs unstructured data

What is data management?

The main difference between big data analytics and traditional data analytics is the type of data handled and the tools used to analyze it. Traditional analytics deals with structured data, typically stored in relational databases . This type of database helps ensure that data is well-organized and easy for a computer to understand. Traditional data analytics relies on statistical methods and tools like structured query language (SQL) for querying databases.

Big data analytics involves massive amounts of data in various formats, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. The complexity of this data requires more sophisticated analysis techniques. Big data analytics employs advanced techniques like machine learning and data mining to extract information from complex data sets. It often requires distributed processing systems like Hadoop to manage the sheer volume of data.

These are the four methods of data analysis at work within big data:

The "what happened" stage of data analysis. Here, the focus is on summarizing and describing past data to understand its basic characteristics.

The “why it happened” stage. By delving deep into the data, diagnostic analysis identifies the root patterns and trends observed in descriptive analytics.

The “what will happen” stage. It uses historical data, statistical modeling and machine learning to forecast trends.

Describes the “what to do” stage, which goes beyond prediction to provide recommendations for optimizing future actions based on insights derived from all previous.

The following dimensions highlight the core challenges and opportunities inherent in big data analytics.

The sheer volume of data generated today, from social media feeds, IoT devices, transaction records and more, presents a significant challenge. Traditional data storage and processing solutions are often inadequate to handle this scale efficiently. Big data technologies and cloud-based storage solutions enable organizations to store and manage these vast data sets cost-effectively, protecting valuable data from being discarded due to storage limitations.

Data is being produced at unprecedented speeds, from real-time social media updates to high-frequency stock trading records. The velocity at which data flows into organizations requires robust processing capabilities to capture, process and deliver accurate analysis in near real-time. Stream processing frameworks and in-memory data processing are designed to handle these rapid data streams and balance supply with demand.

Today's data comes in many formats, from structured to numeric data in traditional databases to unstructured text, video and images from diverse sources like social media and video surveillance. This variety demans flexible data management systems to handle and integrate disparate data types for comprehensive analysis. NoSQL databases , data lakes and schema -on-read technologies provide the necessary flexibility to accommodate the diverse nature of big data.

Data reliability and accuracy are critical, as decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to negative outcomes. Veracity refers to the data's trustworthiness, encompassing data quality, noise and anomaly detection issues. Techniques and tools for data cleaning, validation and verification are integral to ensuring the integrity of big data, enabling organizations to make better decisions based on reliable information.

Big data analytics aims to extract actionable insights that offer tangible value. This involves turning vast data sets into meaningful information that can inform strategic decisions, uncover new opportunities and drive innovation. Advanced analytics, machine learning and AI are key to unlocking the value contained within big data, transforming raw data into strategic assets.

Data professionals, analysts, scientists and statisticians prepare and process data in a data lakehouse, which combines the performance of a data lakehouse with the flexibility of a data lake to clean data and ensure its quality. The process of turning raw data into valuable insights encompasses several key stages:

• Collect data: The first step involves gathering data, which can be a mix of structured and unstructured forms from myriad sources like cloud, mobile applications and IoT sensors. This step is where organizations adapt their data collection strategies and integrate data from varied sources into central repositories like a data lake, which can automatically assign metadata for better manageability and accessibility.
• Process data: After being collected, data must be systematically organized, extracted, transformed and then loaded into a storage system to ensure accurate analytical outcomes. Processing involves converting raw data into a format that is usable for analysis, which might involve aggregating data from different sources, converting data types or organizing data into structure formats. Given the exponential growth of available data, this stage can be challenging. Processing strategies may vary between batch processing, which handles large data volumes over extended periods and stream processing, which deals with smaller real-time data batches.
• Clean data: Regardless of size, data must be cleaned to ensure quality and relevance. Cleaning data involves formatting it correctly, removing duplicates and eliminating irrelevant entries. Clean data prevents the corruption of output and safeguard’s reliability and accuracy.
• Analyze data: Advanced analytics, such as data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning and deep learning, are employed to sift through the processed and cleaned data. These methods allow users to discover patterns, relationships and trends within the data, providing a solid foundation for informed decision-making.

Under the Analyze umbrella, there are potentially many technologies at work, including data mining, which is used to identify patterns and relationships within large data sets; predictive analytics, which forecasts future trends and opportunities; and deep learning , which mimics human learning patterns to uncover more abstract ideas.

Deep learning uses an artificial neural network with multiple layers to model complex patterns in data. Unlike traditional machine learning algorithms, deep learning learns from images, sound and text without manual help. For big data analytics, this powerful capability means the volume and complexity of data is not an issue.

Natural language processing (NLP) models allow machines to understand, interpret and generate human language. Within big data analytics, NLP extracts insights from massive unstructured text data generated across an organization and beyond.

Structured Data

Structured data refers to highly organized information that is easily searchable and typically stored in relational databases or spreadsheets. It adheres to a rigid schema, meaning each data element is clearly defined and accessible in a fixed field within a record or file. Examples of structured data include:

• Customer names and addresses in a customer relationship management (CRM) system
• Transactional data in financial records, such as sales figures and account balances
• Employee data in human resources databases, including job titles and salaries

Structured data's main advantage is its simplicity for entry, search and analysis, often using straightforward database queries like SQL. However, the rapidly expanding universe of big data means that structured data represents a relatively small portion of the total data available to organizations.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured data lacks a pre-defined data model, making it more difficult to collect, process and analyze. It comprises the majority of data generated today, and includes formats such as:

• Textual content from documents, emails and social media posts
• Multimedia content, including images, audio files and videos
• Data from IoT devices, which can include a mix of sensor data, log files and time-series data

The primary challenge with unstructured data is its complexity and lack of uniformity, requiring more sophisticated methods for indexing, searching and analyzing. NLP, machine learning and advanced analytics platforms are often employed to extract meaningful insights from unstructured data.

Semi-structured data

Semi-structured data occupies the middle ground between structured and unstructured data. While it does not reside in a relational database, it contains tags or other markers to separate semantic elements and enforce hierarchies of records and fields within the data. Examples include:

• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) files, which are commonly used for web data interchange
• Email, where the data has a standardized format (e.g., headers, subject, body) but the content within each section is unstructured
• NoSQL databases, can store and manage semi-structured data more efficiently than traditional relational databases

Semi-structured data is more flexible than structured data but easier to analyze than unstructured data, providing a balance that is particularly useful in web applications and data integration tasks.

Ensuring data quality and integrity, integrating disparate data sources, protecting data privacy and security and finding the right talent to analyze and interpret data can present challenges to organizations looking to leverage their extensive data volumes. What follows are the benefits organizations can realize once they see success with big data analytics:

Real-time intelligence

One of the standout advantages of big data analytics is the capacity to provide real-time intelligence. Organizations can analyze vast amounts of data as it is generated from myriad sources and in various formats. Real-time insight allows businesses to make quick decisions, respond to market changes instantaneously and identify and act on opportunities as they arise.

Better-informed decisions

With big data analytics, organizations can uncover previously hidden trends, patterns and correlations. A deeper understanding equips leaders and decision-makers with the information needed to strategize effectively, enhancing business decision-making in supply chain management, e-commerce, operations and overall strategic direction.  

Cost savings

Big data analytics drives cost savings by identifying business process efficiencies and optimizations. Organizations can pinpoint wasteful expenditures by analyzing large datasets, streamlining operations and enhancing productivity. Moreover, predictive analytics can forecast future trends, allowing companies to allocate resources more efficiently and avoid costly missteps.

Better customer engagement

Understanding customer needs, behaviors and sentiments is crucial for successful engagement and big data analytics provides the tools to achieve this understanding. Companies gain insights into consumer preferences and tailor their marketing strategies by analyzing customer data.

Optimized risk management strategies

Big data analytics enhances an organization's ability to manage risk by providing the tools to identify, assess and address threats in real time. Predictive analytics can foresee potential dangers before they materialize, allowing companies to devise preemptive strategies.

As organizations across industries seek to leverage data to drive decision-making, improve operational efficiencies and enhance customer experiences, the demand for skilled professionals in big data analytics has surged. Here are some prominent career paths that utilize big data analytics:

Data scientist

Data scientists analyze complex digital data to assist businesses in making decisions. Using their data science training and advanced analytics technologies, including machine learning and predictive modeling, they uncover hidden insights in data.

Data analyst

Data analysts turn data into information and information into insights. They use statistical techniques to analyze and extract meaningful trends from data sets, often to inform business strategy and decisions.

Data engineer

Data engineers prepare, process and manage big data infrastructure and tools. They also develop, maintain, test and evaluate data solutions within organizations, often working with massive datasets to assist in analytics projects.

Machine learning engineer

Machine learning engineers focus on designing and implementing machine learning applications. They develop sophisticated algorithms that learn from and make predictions on data.

Business intelligence analyst

Business intelligence (BI) analysts help businesses make data-driven decisions by analyzing data to produce actionable insights. They often use BI tools to convert data into easy-to-understand reports and visualizations for business stakeholders.

Data visualization specialist

These specialists focus on the visual representation of data. They create data visualizations that help end users understand the significance of data by placing it in a visual context.

Data architect

Data architects design, create, deploy and manage an organization's data architecture. They define how data is stored, consumed, integrated and managed by different data entities and IT systems.

IBM and Cloudera have partnered to create an industry-leading, enterprise-grade big data framework distribution plus a variety of cloud services and products — all designed to achieve faster analytics at scale.

IBM Db2 Database on IBM Cloud Pak for Data combines a proven, AI-infused, enterprise-ready data management system with an integrated data and AI platform built on the security-rich, scalable Red Hat OpenShift foundation.

IBM Big Replicate is an enterprise-class data replication software platform that keeps data consistent in a distributed environment, on-premises and in the hybrid cloud, including SQL and NoSQL databases.

A data warehouse is a system that aggregates data from different sources into a single, central, consistent data store to support data analysis, data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to get answers they can understand. Instead of using best guesses, they can base decisions on what their business data is telling them — whether it relates to production, supply chain, customers or market trends.

Cloud computing is the on-demand access of physical or virtual servers, data storage, networking capabilities, application development tools, software, AI analytic tools and more—over the internet with pay-per-use pricing. The cloud computing model offers customers flexibility and scalability compared to traditional infrastructure.

Purpose-built data-driven architecture helps support business intelligence across the organization. IBM analytics solutions allow organizations to simplify raw data access, provide end-to-end data management and empower business users with AI-driven self-service analytics to predict outcomes.

Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today >

Microsoft Advertising case studies

How Rainbow Tours achieved high-value outcomes with Microsoft Advertising

How ENRG Pro achieved a 95% ad completion rate with Microsoft’s Connected TV ads

The first Pharmaceutical brand to launch Video ads with Microsoft Advertising saw almost 2X increase in brand searches

How Blue Corona helped Len The Plumber Heating & Air increase ROAS with Microsoft Advertising

How Blue Corona helped Len The Plumber Heating & Air increase return on ad spend (ROAS) by 318% with Microsoft Advertising

How ixigo generated a remarkable 44% total conversions with Microsoft’s Dynamic Search Ads

Green KPIs for the win: How Microsoft Invest helps brands lowering carbon emissions

Wegovy users keep weight off for 4 years, new analysis finds

Patients taking Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy obesity treatment maintained an average of 10% weight loss after four years, potentially boosting the drugmaker’s case to insurers and governments to cover the cost of the effective but expensive drug.

The Danish drugmaker presented the new long-term data on Tuesday at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice, Italy, in a new analysis from a large study for which substantial results had been  published  last year.

“This is the longest study we’ve conducted so far of semaglutide for weight loss,” Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s head of development, said in an interview, referring to the active ingredient in Wegovy and the company’s diabetes drug Ozempic.

“We see that once the majority of the weight loss is accrued, you don’t go back and start to increase in weight if you stay on the drug,” he added.

The data could go some way to convince insurers and governments to reimburse Wegovy, which ranges from $200 to almost $2,000 a month in the 10 countries it has been  launched  in so far.

Wegovy was the first to market from a newer generation of medicines known as GLP-1 agonists, originally developed for diabetes, that  provide  a new way to address record obesity rates. Eli Lilly launched its rival drug Zepbound in the United States in December. Neither company has been able to produce enough  to meet unprecedented demand .

Dr. Simon Cork, Senior Lecturer in Physiology from Anglia Ruskin University, said Britain’s public health service’s decision to limit coverage of the medicine to two years was “because of questionable long-term effectiveness”.

The new data showing benefits continuing to four years may go some way to negating that argument, he said.

How Wegovy benefits the heart

The 17,604-patient trial tested Wegovy not for weight loss but for its heart protective benefits for overweight and obese patients who had pre-existing heart disease but not diabetes. Participants were not required to track diet and exercise because it was not an obesity study.

Around 17% of trial participants stopped using Wegovy due to side effects, the most common of which was nausea, Novo said in another analysis in the trial published by the drugmaker on Tuesday.

Patients in the trial, called Select, lost an average of nearly 10% of their total body weight after 65 weeks on Wegovy. That percentage weight-loss was roughly sustained year-on-year until the end of about four years, where weight loss stood at 10.2%, the company said.

A third new analysis on Select published by Novo on Tuesday showed that the heart protective benefits of Wegovy to patients in the trial occurred regardless of their weight before starting on the drug and regardless of how much weight they lose on it.

“We now also understand that while we know that body weight loss is important, it’s not the only thing driving the cardiovascular benefit of semaglutide treatment”, Lange told Reuters in the interview.

The Select study, released in August, showed that Wegovy reduced the risk of a major cardiovascular event such as a stroke by 20% in overweight or obese people with a history of heart disease.

Novo says researchers are still working to understand the mechanisms of the cardiovascular protection that semaglutide provides.

Wegovy and Zepbound are being tested to assess their benefits in a variety of other medical uses such as lowering heart attack risk and for sleep apnea and kidney disease.

The weight loss in the heart trial was less than the average of 15% weight loss in earlier Wegovy obesity studies before the drug was launched in the United States in June 2021.

McCourt School of Public Policy

Case Study: Rethinking City Government and Nonprofit Relationships

Posted in News Story

Natalie Sandoval is a 2023-2024 Pablo Eisenberg Public Interest Fellow at the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership. 

In pursuit of better serving the public, governments have been rethinking traditional sector practices in favor of more innovative, inclusive, and efficient systems. Taking inspiration from existing models, the Office of Strategic Partnerships (OSP) in Jacksonville, Florida was created to align the public, private and philanthropic sectors around common goals to create better outcomes for all Duval County residents. 

The Office of Strategic Partnerships aimed to address the challenges that local partners face when attempting to coordinate and implement services for residents. The groundwork for this office required investment from community partners, tireless work from its director, and the continual support of the mayor. Through the leadership of Director Dawn Lockhart, the initial years of the OSP were entrenched in deep commitment to reach overlooked partners, develop clear, collective goals, and maintain consistent communication. Through trust-building, intensive cooperation, and the long-term commitment of OSP partners, the partners were able to increase their capacity as local leaders, and deliver increased access to services for Duval county citizens. The Mayor’s Downtown Homelessness Task Force and Census 2020 serve as two case studies further exploring the model and its impact on the community. As the Office of Strategic Partnerships has moved through different phases, its initial groundwork and services to citizens serve as a model for other local governments. 

Between 2002-2013, the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership developed customized programs for the Jessie Ball duPont Fund in Jacksonville, Florida. Through this connection, the Center learned of the significant work occurring in Jacksonville in recent years and was connected to OSP Director Dawn Lockhart. This case study highlights OSP’s commitment to cross-sector partnerships as a strategy to achieve greater impact for citizens in Jacksonville.

Read the entire  case study here.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts
• Currently reading: Business of law: case studies
• Practitioners: persuasion with a dash of comedy
• Intrapreneurs: leaders who turn ideas into action
• Burnout concerns prompt shift in law firm wellbeing policies
• Rewards for training spark ‘healthy competition’ at law firms
• Practice of law: case studies
• In-house lawyers: case studies

Business of law: case studies

• Business of law: case studies on x (opens in a new window)
• Business of law: case studies on facebook (opens in a new window)
• Business of law: case studies on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• Business of law: case studies on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

These five sets of case studies highlight how law firms in Asia-Pacific are innovating as businesses.

They feature examples of law firms changing how they manage their own people, and how they are reinventing services and delivery models.

All the case studies were researched, compiled and ranked by RSGI. “Winner” indicates that the organisation won an FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific award for 2024

Read the other FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific ‘Best practice case studies’, which showcase the standout innovations made for and by people working in the legal sector:

Practice of law In-house

People and skills

WINNER: Gilbert + Tobin Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25 Last year, the firm ran an “AI Bounty” competition, offering staff a total of A$20,000 in prizes for their best ideas on deploying artificial intelligence at work. The contest attracted 106 submissions, with the money split among five main award winners and 50 smaller prizes. The firm will develop the best ideas identified, including tools to review a privacy policy and enhance due diligence.

Inkling Legal Design O: 9; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 24 The firm developed an online course that encourages writing in plain, straightforward English and provides a benchmark against which other lawyers can compare how well they write about ambiguous areas of law. The application, which launched last year, is designed to improve efficiency and accuracy when writing and has been used by eight clients so far.

Highly commended

Lander & Rogers O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23 In its continuing partnership with Melbourne’s Monash University, the Australian firm invited five law students — dubbed “AI investigative agents” — to interview practice group heads and work with the firm’s innovation team to examine scenarios in which the technology might be applied. The training initiative identified more than 40 examples for possible use and the students’ insights on the topic have been published by the firm.

MinterEllison O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22 The firm created its own internal cryptocurrency to reward staff for taking part in its online training sessions. The so-called Mintcoins can be exchanged internally for charity donations or gift cards and have helped encourage the completion of more than 1,900 training modules by 850 people.

Rajah & Tann Singapore O: 7; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 22 The firm identified several common skills and qualities required by its lawyers working across the various business sectors, jurisdictions and languages in the region. These include project management and communication skills aside from specific legal knowledge. Lawyers can receive 50-plus hours of training and at least half of the programme comprises practical activities.

Ashurst O: 6; L: 7; I: 8; Total: 21 Lawyers at the firm can now use an online tool to highlight their availability and expertise, to help with allocation of work. In the first eight months of use, it received more than 720 notifications of availability from lawyers across the firm’s Asia-Pacific offices.

Khaitan & Co O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21 The firm worked with a consultancy to set up a process that assesses lawyers in areas such as productivity and business development skills, to decide if they are ready for partnership promotion.

Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu O: 8; L: 6; I: 6; Total: 20 The firm created a programme where associates work with partners to develop new client relationships in emerging practice areas. These areas include the latest tech developments, sports, and agriculture and fishing industries.

King & Wood Mallesons O: 6; L: 6; I: 7; Total: 19 The firm added new modules in AI, process improvement and change management to its “legal transformation belts” programme, which grades and certifies digital skills and is also available to clients.

Knowledge and data

WINNER: MinterEllison Originality: 7; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 24 In December 2023, the firm’s environment and planning team led a pilot of a generative AI tool that can draft legal documents that are roughly 80 per cent assembled in under a minute. Replicating a junior lawyer’s work, the model draws information from a repository of the firm’s historic advice, and other sources, to provide a draft that senior lawyers can check and amend. The pilot involved 50 lawyers and the firm now plans to roll out the tool across the practices. Commended individual: Simon Ball

King & Wood Mallesons O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23 The firm’s commercial real estate practice developed a system based on records of past property transactions to identify market trends across Asia. Using data visualisation software, the tool helps identify patterns across the firm’s global property work, such as popular drafting clauses and market standards. According to the firm, the tool has reduced typical time taken for some research tasks from up to four hours to just minutes.

JunHe O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22 To encourage use of its knowledge-management system, the Chinese firm added training materials along with a feature that automatically logs when training sessions are taken. The firm also rewards its 700-plus lawyers for adding good quality data to the platform by tying this to their bonuses. This has led to an increase in activity on the platform, with 25,000 clicks recorded per month in 2023.

Khaitan & Co O: 8; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 22 The firm sifted 17mn items to identify 841,000 relevant documents for future case work and integrate them into a searchable system. AI tools, under development, will be able to create summaries of the documents and perform predictive analysis on contracts.

Anand and Anand O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21 The Indian firm created a “matter knowledge” bank where users can search for a case and generate a summary of relevant details. It spent three years digitising decades’ worth of physical documents and started using the repository in June 2023. The firm hopes to improve processes such as document drafting and trial preparation and encourage internal collaboration.

Clifford Chance O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20 The firm developed a tool to help with billing when a client’s requirements change during a transaction, and launched it in the Asia-Pacific region. The spreadsheet-based system gives an improved overview of work done on particular case work with live projections, allowing significantly faster billing decisions.

Sprintlaw O: 7; L: 8; I: 5; Total: 20 In 2023, the Australian firm launched a knowledge-sharing platform for staff servicing smaller businesses. The internal resource has halved the time taken for its lawyers to create some documents, such as standard shareholder agreements.

Hogan Lovells O: 6; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 19 The lawyers conducted a document review for an anti-bribery investigation using AI software that required training in Vietnamese. The subsequent search has identified 150,000 documents for scrutiny by lawyers.

Digital tools

WINNER: Clifford Chance Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25 The firm partnered with tech company Microsoft to create a generative artificial intelligence bot, launched in late October, that tracks and summarises press releases published by Hong Kong regulators.

Lawyers in the region took the lead on ensuring the tool had appropriate understanding of legal jargon and included a summarisation and context extraction function that will save the firm an estimated 480 hours of associate and trainee time per year. Output can be turned into interactive graphs and trends, which the lawyers use to advise clients.

Yulchon O: 8; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 23 The South Korean firm created a service to help clients better comply with the country’s Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA), introduced in 2022, which puts greater responsibility on businesses to ensure safety in their operations and facilities.

The service involves a free self-diagnosis tool that shows clients where they are most at risk of violating SAPA. The firm also uses automation to track news reports of SAPA-related incidents and has created a training programme with videos offering insights into the law. The programme uses an AI-powered search engine to help clients find specific information.

Clayton Utz O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22 The Sydney-based firm launched an AI-generated compliance portal, Obligations Navigator, in December 2023. In a client assessment, the portal analysed 100 examples of case law and produced a hyperlinked list of 42,000 obligations, described in plain English and checked by human lawyers. Summarising compliance requirements can be labour-intensive, so the portal saves time and resources and gives the client a clear and comprehensive compliance process — helping them understand which obligations they must comply with, and how.

Lander & Rogers O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21 The Australian firm developed an AI tool to extract relevant information from files submitted alongside compensation claims. The innovation and compensation law teams partnered with the firm’s legal tech incubator, Halisok, to digitise the manually-intensive sorting process in mass litigation and class action suits.

Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu O: 5; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 21 Led by managing partner Soichiro Fujiwara, the firm’s technology start-up MNTSQ designed an AI-powered search engine that allows lawyers to search an internal contract database for relevant Japanese clauses and provisions, after the firm found public search engines such as Google were insufficient.

Rajah & Tann Singapore O: 7; L: 7; I: 6; Total: 20 In June 2023, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority implemented new requirements for anti-money laundering checks in residential property purchases. The Singaporean law firm launched an AI tool that automates these due diligence checks of potential buyers, which is now used by 30 property developers in the country.

MinterEllison O: 5; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 19 The firm developed a contract review tool to help mining group Anglo American manage its supply chain and contracts. The firm approached the miner — a long-term client — after it struggled with the management of contracts. Lawyers used the company’s data to build the tool from scratch in 2023. Commended individual: Benjamin Fox

Digital strategy

WINNER: A&O Shearman Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25 In partnership with legal tech company Harvey, A&O Shearman (formerly Allen & Overy) was among the first law firms to make wide use of a generative AI tool in early 2023.

Capitalising on the publicity this created, it then launched an AI client working group in Asia Pacific where 81 participants from 19 companies paid the firm for advice on generative AI’s potential legal implications and practical lessons about adoption of the technology in a big organisation.

Highly Commended

Ashurst O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23 The firm has run pilots and trials of generative AI that involved more than 400 staff in 23 offices including a competition to identify future applications and blind trials testing applications against humans. The strategy has been implemented worldwide, with a prominent role played by the team from Australia. The firm says nearly 90 per cent of staff felt its technology focus was preparing them for the coming years.

Mayer Brown O: 7; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 23 The Hong Kong office led the rollout in 2023 of AI tool Harvey for use in research, drafting, and data analysis. It is also used to cut the time spent summarising local case law, to improve due diligence, and Chinese-to-English translations.

PwC Asia Pacific O: 7; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 22 The firm’s Asia-Pacific business merged its legal and NewLaw legal services divisions to help clients implement related technology.

Internally, the firm is using AI tool Harvey and its own virtual assistant ChatPwC, as well as experimenting with other relevant tools. The firm recorded more than 18,000 queries being submitted to Harvey in the first six months of using it in the region and estimates that the application saved the firm 9,000 hours of time in that period.

Rajah & Tann Singapore O: 6; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 21 The firm is working with its technology arm Rajah & Tann Technologies to bring in external software that will encourage lawyers to embrace digitisation fully and prepare for the future adoption of AI systems. Examples include applications that are designed to cut the time spent on research and to locate the relevant contract clauses from a centralised database.

JunHe O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20 The Chinese law firm’s tech team created a tool that automates the identification and redaction of sensitive material from documents. This tool helps lawyers protect sensitive data and better comply with data protection laws in China when using generative AI.

Trilegal O: 6; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 20 Trilegal’s digital innovation group is leading technological advances at the Indian law firm, creating a knowledge management system and AI-based dashboards to monitor work progress and preparing existing systems to incorporate generative AI.

New solutions

WINNER: Inkling Legal Design Originality: 8; Leadership: 9; Impact: 8; Total: 25 The firm advised the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) on redesigning its commercial project agreements. The lawyers simplified the contracts used by the public research body for project partners, which predominantly include scientists with a non-legal background. Clauses were simplified and legal jargon removed, while retaining legal compliance and addressing complex scientific issues. Redesigning these contracts has led to greater collaboration between the legal department at ANSTO and other parties, internally and externally. Using digital tools and visuals made the contracts easier to navigate.

A&O Shearman O: 7; L: 8; I: 9; Total: 24 In response to China’s property market crash, the firm developed an interactive portal to help co-ordinating committees representing bank lenders to navigate complex, large-scale corporate restructurings. The portal provides clients with access to resources relating to relevant restructurings, a Q&A tool and document review capabilities. Rapid access to comprehensive information and support saves clients time and money.

Lawpath O: 6; L: 8; I: 8; Total: 22 The Australian firm is targeting smaller companies by providing low-cost access to software and document libraries that use AI to fill out contracts and agreements. A human lawyer can be involved to check documents or deal with more complex work if required.

Atsumi & Sakai O: 6; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 21 The Tokyo-based law firm’s Policy Research Institute advised the Japanese government on emerging technology topics, such as developing AI regulation and the construction of a semiconductor factory.

Pinsent Masons O: 7; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 21 The firm has broadened the legal services it offers at each stage of big renewable energy projects to offer clients a more integrated service — ranging from environmental, social and governance assessments to licensing and property transactions. Commended individual: Mark Hu

KPMG Law O: 5; L: 8; I: 7; Total: 20 The firm created a platform to assess how well equipped a company’s legal team is. The system, launched in 2022, uses a digital tool and questionnaires to gather data about the company and automates a report to help in-house teams assess their resourcing.

Keypoint Law O: 5; L: 7; I: 7; Total: 19 The Australian firm is celebrating a decade of operating without billable hour targets or budgets. The policy aims to offer a more flexible working arrangement to lawyers. Partners are typically paid 70 per cent of the services they charge to clients but, if they do not earn, there is no guaranteed pay. The firm has grown to 75 partners since it was launched in 2014.

Promoted Content

Explore the series.

Follow the topics in this article

• Law Add to myFT
• Legal services Add to myFT
• Clifford Chance LLP Add to myFT
• KPMG LLP Add to myFT
• Hogan Lovells International LLP Add to myFT

Comments have not been enabled for this article.

International Edition

Plants restrict use of 'Tipp-Ex proteins'

Molecules that modify copies of genes are only permitted in certain cell organelles.

Plants have special corrective molecules at their disposal that can make retrospective modifications to copies of genes. However, it would appear that these "Tipp-Ex proteins" do not have permission to work in all areas of the cell, only being used in chloroplasts and mitochondria. A study by the University of Bonn has now explained why this is the case. It suggests that the correction mechanism would otherwise modify copies that have nothing wrong with them, with fatal consequences for the cell. The findings have now been published in The Plant Journal .

Plant cells possess a whole host of specialized structures known as organelles, of which two particularly important ones are the chloroplasts and mitochondria. The former use light energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugar, while the latter do more or less the same thing in reverse: they "burn" sugar and other compounds to generate the energy needed for numerous cellular processes.

The two organelles are unique in that they have their own genes. This genetic material works like sets of assembly instructions for key molecules that the organelles require for their work. If a chloroplast needs to make a certain protein, for instance, it first orders a copy of the relevant assembly instructions that it can then use to produce the protein.

Genes from chloroplasts and mitochondria often defective

"However, the genes in chloroplasts and mitochondria often contain defects," explains Elena Lesch, a doctoral student at the University of Bonn's Institute for Cellular and Molecular Botany. "So the copies have to be corrected, otherwise the proteins assembled based on their instructions won't work." For this, plants use a kind of Tipp-Ex -- special molecules that belong to the group of pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins.

Plants have at least a dozen and, in some cases, as many as several thousand of these special PPR proteins, each one of which corrects highly specific defects. It is as if every word in a newspaper had its own sub-editor. Rather than being made in the organelles in which they are used, however, the PPR proteins are manufactured outside of the organelles, within the cytosol.

The cytosol is also packed full of gene copies, although these come from the cell's nucleus, where most of the many thousands of the plant's genes are stored. By contrast, mitochondria and chloroplasts only contain a few dozen genes each. The "Tipp-Ex proteins" could theoretically correct the copies inside the cytosol too. "But they don't," Lesch says. "They only do their work in the organelles, and we wanted to know why."

Swamping the transportation mechanism into the organelles

One reason might be that the "molecular sub-editors" are simply moved too quickly from the cytosol into the organelles. To investigate this possibility, the researchers fitted a kind of molecular switch to PPR genes inside some of the moss Physcomitrium. This enabled them to make the cells produce very large quantities of PPR proteins virtually at the touch of a button. "We were able to demonstrate that this swamps the transportation mechanism," reveals Lesch's colleague Mirjam Thielen, who conducted many of the experiments. "It caused a pile-up of PPR proteins in the cytosol."

Once they had arrived in the cytosol, they began to modify copies from the nucleus. "We analyzed the changes they made and saw that the proteins had modified a great many sets of assembly instructions that would actually have been correct," Lesch says. "Incorrect interventions like these are counterproductive, of course, because they can put protein functions at risk." But why should this be happening in the first place? As well as detecting defects, the PPR proteins also bind to what are known as off-target sequences, areas that may look like a defective sequence but are actually perfectly fine. "With copies of tens of thousands of genes jostling for space inside the cytosol, the risk of these off-target sequences being corrected incorrectly would be high," Lesch notes.

Production of "Tipp-Ex" molecules subject to strict regulation

To prevent this, plants generally only ever make relatively low quantities of PPR proteins, which are then transported straight into the organelles before the molecular "Tipp-Ex" in the cytosol can do any harm. Because the number of genes -- and thus how many copies of them there are -- inside the chloroplasts and mitochondria is manageable, no such miscorrections tend to occur there.

The study is supplying new insights into how these corrective proteins identify their targets. In the future, therefore, it may be possible to use the findings to make highly targeted modifications to specific copies of genes inside mitochondria and chloroplasts and to investigate the effect of such modifications. Given the important roles that these organelles play in plants' energy metabolism, this also opens up scope for some interesting practical applications.

The work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology
• Endangered Plants
• Developmental Biology
• Biotechnology and Bioengineering
• Mitochondrion
• Natural killer cell
• Chloroplast

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Bonn . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Mirjam Thielen, Béla Gärtner, Volker Knoop, Mareike Schallenberg‐Rüdinger, Elena Lesch. Conquering new grounds: plant organellar C‐to‐U RNA editing factors can be functional in the plant cytosol . The Plant Journal , 2024; DOI: 10.1111/tpj.16804

Cite This Page :

Explore More

• High-Efficiency Photonic Integrated Circuit
• Life Expectancy May Increase by 5 Years by 2050
• Toward a Successful Vaccine for HIV
• Highly Efficient Thermoelectric Materials
• Toward Human Brain Gene Therapy
• Whale Families Learn Each Other's Vocal Style
• AI Can Answer Complex Physics Questions
• Otters Use Tools to Survive a Changing World
• Monogamy in Mice: Newly Evolved Type of Cell
• Sustainable Electronics, Doped With Air

Trending Topics

Strange & offbeat.