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Samuel A. Guiberson
Law
Technology News
June 1999
If you haven't learned to speak the language of technology in the 20th century, you will have no voice in the 21st.
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.
The hard fact is that some lawyers have a future in law practice and other lawyers have none. The difference between the future haves and the have nots is drawn distinctly in the present between those lawyers who choose to change their practices and those who don't yet know that they have no choice.
We live in a world in which there are people who own $18 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 some tropical 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 the old fashioned way. 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.
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?
If you want to understand technology's role in trial practice, the first thing you have to accept is that no one really knows how it will reshape law practice beyond the millennium. Along with all the other basic assumptions about conducting business, technology challenges our every assumption 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 litigator 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.
In the 21st century, no enterprise will prosper unless it is both technologically capable and also technologically resourceful. If you haven't learned to speak the language of technology in the 20th century, you will have no voice in the 21st.
Today, clients don't care whether you've been practicing law in their zip code for the last 50 years or 15 minutes. If the client's employees in the mailroom can interact more effectively with corporate management 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 even the same 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 short cycling the way the client likes it, that law firm is in and your law firm is out.
Everything we have known will cease to be as we have known it, but something not necessarily worse is coming about. 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 won't come 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. 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. The only constant for the rest of our professional careers will be constant change.
The prime directive for a successful legal career in the new millennium is to be good counsel in the art of change. 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
that 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.
