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Jonathan_Graehl comments on The Bias You Didn't Expect - Less Wrong
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I can imagine that individuals might be unable to spot the correlation. But if the lawyering industry is competitive to any significant degree, it would be strikingly implausible if none of the competitors ever stumbled onto it and proceeded to take advantage of it. Especially considering that larger law firms, and even individual lawyers with long experience, could easily data-mine their past record for such correlations. Are they all really too stupid to think of that?
Whenever social scientists -- a phrase I'm always tempted to put into scare quotes -- claim that they've found something that indicates unexploited profit opportunities if true, it is likely that they're either talking nonsense or that they've reinvented some wheel that is however infeasible or forbidden to use in practice (at least openly) for other reasons. Otherwise, it would violate the weak efficient markets hypothesis, in which I certainly have far more confidence than in "social science."
I agree, but you should consider that this is about to happen (in a widespread way) for the first time.
Also, some people keep such knowledge to themselves - weighing the advantage they get from being one of the few to have and use it as more than they'd get by gaining fame in sharing it. (But it's true that such powerful secrets tend to spread rapidly, if shared at all.)