I used to work with a very smart lawyer who said that he could
give a legal opinion that the world was flat if his qualifying
language was not limited. In that case, he would have stated
something on the order of: this opinion does not take into account
developments after 1491 or the opinions of scientists and
philosophers.
Last year, a Yale law professor publicized a forthcoming study
of 401(k) plan fees (written with a University of Virginia
co-author) that suffered from the same flaw as the "world is
flat" opinion; he used data from 2009 and seemed uninformed
about the impact of subsequent developments such as the
implementation of mandatory fee disclosures, which studies (and here) have shown resulted in reductions in
fees. This Yale-study and the letters that the professor sent to
companies about their "high fee plans" (so-called due to
the results of his old and incomplete data ), threatening to
publicly identify those plan sponsors, justifiably generated
