The
question is whether that same medium of business generation will be the predominant
paradigm in the next decade or two. If we have a highly interconnected industrial
and corporate client base, you will not be able to putt your way to prosperity
in law practice. You will have to "net" your way to prosperity,
because those clients will not do business with law firms where the senior
partner of the firm knows less about e-mail than the mail boy.
The
more technologically adept one is, the shorter the response time becomes
and, basically, law is a touch business. If you can't ouch quickly and be touched
quickly, you can't compete for clients.
The
question on the floor was: how do lawyers, not law firms, differentiate themselves
from other practitioners in a world in which lawyers and all knowledge professionals
become information hunter-gathers, all competing for the knowledge protein
in information? That's the world we'll live in Those lawyers who are more
adept at globalizing their resources, mastering the vectors to usable information
in an electronically fused world of information and knowledge those are the
people who will succeed.
And
the crying and wringing of hands about lawyers who won't adapt to technology
has to do with trying to preserve an obsolete paradigm, an obsolete organizational
model for the way legal services and legal services communities are organized.
They
will be people who share a vision of how they should do what the do for a
living.
An
organization in the future will be too big as soon as it is so large that
it cannot hold a single concept for why it should exist. And if it's one person
too large to hold that common vision of how to go about doing things, then
that group is too large.
The
irony here is that in an age of electrons, the power of the word has never
been greater. You can hold together a group of people that runs into the millions if
not, perhaps, some day the billions, by the power of the content of the information
you can share with them. That's an exponential leap in terms of how literate
humankind can convey inspiration to the population.
Success
will come to those who are more diversified in their advocacy tools. Lawyers
are traditionally wordsmiths. They will become imagesmiths, videosmiths, soundsmiths.
They will be people who can advocate and communicate effectively across a
wide range of media and not just words. That's the trend.
The
trial lawyer of the future is going to be someone who can communicate in whatever
media is the most invigorating and effective for communicating his or her
message.
This
is the message that those corporate techno-bumpkins never get, that the range
of perception
that comes through the existing technologies is only for the purpose of making
human interaction more human, not less.
