We live in a world in which there are people who own eighteen million dollar private jet planes and also people who own one wooden stick and stab frogs. There is nothing particularly new about a world in which access to technology divides us. Lawyers, however, are not used to having the diversity of professional lifestyles afforded them differ quite that profoundly. Although it will still be possible after the turn of the century to have a law practice that resembles what we're used to, the consequence of having one will be that you spend your days looking for clients under small, flat rocks deep in the Amazonian jungle.
No lawyer living anywhere except the deepest part of the jungle hasn't already heard technology touted as the great catalyst for change in the legal profession. What is much less understood is that technology is not a series of hurdles that lawyers have to jump over to get back to doing business. It is not a fashion accessory, silicon jewelry that the trendsetters want to be seen wearing. Integrating technology's progress into law practice is a perpetual process of change, not just change in the goods you practice with, but in the way you make your practice good.
If you want to talk about understanding technology, the first thing you have to understand is that no one really knows how it will reshape law practice beyond the millennium. Along with all the other basic assumptions about doing business, technology challenges the basic assumptions about what legal work is going to amount to next century. The whole culture of law practice is in flux because it is now possible to do everything we used to do behind a desk in a law office in so many other ways, from so many other places. The professional habits of being a lawyer that were once so well circumscribed have now become freeform. No two lawyers now have to do the same thing in the same way, or from the same place. Physical and intellectual independence will be byproducts of the technologies that unbind us from the professional conventions of the law office practice model. Technology will become so integral a part of the way we perform as lawyers, that there will be little else in law practice that we have more in common.
Until you comprehend the accelerating rate of change in the world's technologically endowed societies, now really just one, single global society based in communications and information technology, for whose benefit the planet is enveloped in an electronic membrane of instantly accessible information, amounting to no less than all the things the human mind has ever known and knows today, and that just happens to be growing exponentially by the day for the rest of our lives, you really can't understand why it is that the only constant for the rest of our professional lives will be constant change. No legal professional will succeed without acquiring skill in managing the process of change. The most valuable asset in law practice will be owning a working plan for moving fluidly through generation after generation of technology in transition.
Because all technology is in a state of vanishing, working its way in short order from innovation to obsolescence, you have to focus on the learning process and not the products of technology. We can't indulge ourselves in the delusion that our law practices will remain just as they have been before, except now with a big color monitor and laser printer on our credenza.
Technology's embrace is not just a passing fancy for legal workers any more than it is for the rest of the world's work. Technology has become the lightning rod for the transformation of humanity. If we're going to be part of such noble doings, if technology has become the lifeblood of commerce and the DNA for global societal change, how can lawyers think that their participation is optional? How would you react today if you learned that you were moving to a foreign country tomorrow morning with your family to start a new job, and you don't speak a word of the native language? The future is that country, and technology is that language.
Today, clients don't care whether you've been practicing law in their zip code for the last fifty years or fifteen minutes. If the guys in the client's mail room can communicate more effectively with corporate management via e-mail than management can with their own lawyers, the client won't care whether you're there on Saturdays to play golf with them or not, your law firm is history and the firm that replaces yours doesn't have to be in the same zip code, area code, or time zone to out-perform you. It doesn't matter whether they give your now ex-client quality services through a wire, over the air, through a cable, or from inside a ruby-red laser beam, so long as instant communications keep the attorney-client feedback loop happening just the way the client likes it, that law firm is in and your law firm is out.
Technology is causing the world to come together and to fall apart at the same time. Understanding how all this constructive chaos will impact on the legal profession will distinguish the successful practice from the subsistence practice in the next century. To sustain your practice in a time of technological tumult, you will have to accept whatever changes permit you to exploit the leading edge of what technology allows, and you will have to reject marginalizing the power of that technology by trying to fit revolutionary new tools into old professional patterns.
Everything we have known will cease to be as we have known it, but something not necessarily worse is coming about. We are about to be compelled to explore our professional individuality in ways that careers in law have not before encouraged. The familiar organizational model of the string of names law firm combining professional resources, reputations, and pooled capital beneath one roof will achieve less and less competitive advantage. The creative energy in law practice will now come not from the combination of resources into a single business entity, but from individual lawyers working out a unique practice profile and projecting it into the broadest possible marketplace.
Our clients have already become a part of a global market, and there is an emerging electronic marketplace for legal services that is far more open and unstructured than any we're used to. Lawyers who still believe the world will beat a path to their doorstep will soon find the beaten path far away from it. Creative desperation will result in a generation of successes and failures as lawyers take risks and experiment with new ways to offer, organize, and price legal services. For those among us who will be unwilling or unable to use information and communications technology to extrapolate a virtual professional presence from their physical practice, road kill is too kind a description. There will be no law practice beyond the millennium which is not well-practiced in a constant process of technology adoption and organizational change.
The prime directive for a successful legal career in the new millennium is to find good counsel in the art of change. In the twenty-first century, no enterprise will prosper unless it is both technologically capable and also technologically resourceful. Unless you learn to speak the language of technology in the twentieth century, you will have no voice in the twenty-first.
It should be obvious by now that professional survival in the twenty-first century is going to be a twenty-four hour-a-day process. While there will be a period of hand wringing over long and unstructured work hours, keep in mind that it never occurred to our frog sticking friend in the Amazonian jungle that he ought to quit looking for his frog at five o'clock. Your line of work won't be so different from his. You are both hunter gatherers living off your wits. The difference is that your game is more abstract; you walk through a jungle of thickly overgrown information, and from that profusion of vegetation, you must find enough knowledge protein for you and your clients to survive.
The law practice paradigm hasn't altogether changed for the worst. While work may be restored to the Darwinian precedent of being a twenty-four hour-a-day process, out of the same process of social and industrial change that repeals the work day will come a bounty of information, and the emotional sustenance of more familial relationships with those you love and those with whom you work.
While the technology reforms the way the way we think about the practice of law, it opens us to a new human potential as we become able to explore broader and broader bandwidths of information and experience.
Our children already have an electronic intimacy with all the people of the world; and the information and creative resources they possess so far surpass that of our own childhoods, that it is nearly inconceivable that we were raised on the same planet. Our children may not punch out at five p.m., but they will punch into a larger universe of educational resources than any previous generation ever imagined. Our children will become part of the whole planet, as the whole planet will become part of them. That is the bargain we have made with the future; to transform our relationship with all of humanity as well as with our own humanity. We are all going to be more a part of everything, just as we become less a part of all that has been familiar to us during most of our working lives.
We will have to learn to work in a more intuitive and a more creative way because that is what the technology will dictate. Technology is not necessarily the enemy of our virtues. Unlike other machines that compel humans to imitate them, these technologies enable us to be more human, not less. We will have to learn how to be more human to work well with our new machines.
A moment like this in world history may not come again for another millennium. We should not pretend that what is happening around us is banal when it is of more historic import in the development of human potential than the invention of the wheel. The opportunity it presents for human growth and the doors it will open for intellectual enrichment are still beyond our imagining.
To lawyers, these prospects ought to be exciting. Lawyers ought to revel in the notion that they can be advisors, not scriveners, that they can retreat from the notion of legal advice as a product and revisit the more traditional role of the lawyer as counselor. Lawyering will become more about relationships, the more it evolves technologically. Those professional relationships will be conducted in a progressively more instantaneous and effortless electronic medium, that places a greater value on the broadest range of interpersonal and communication skills.
We are privileged to a future which encourages self-reliance, creativity, individuality, and the free exchange of ideas. There is nothing in such a future for lawyers to fear, so long as we have lost the fear of change.
