When Is It Too Late To Reinvent The Legal Profession?

My son Jeremy, whose company is Never Stop Marketing, advises me that what a client wants to hear at the outset is your value in solving the client’s problems, not your credentials.

By this measure, if you work as effectively alone from a home office or from an WiFi hot spot then it should not matter to the client. This is true, to a point. The client will look at your credentials, seek to determine that you are a person of substance, not just a cellphone number or a post office box number that may disappear overnight. If you have a history, then use it. If you are creating your professional life, then think about how to provide these assurances. Is volunteering to the client that you have professional malpractice insurance advisable and comforting ? I have not seen references on web pages, but it is an idea for the sole practicioner to describe that you have coverage unless you think that this makes you a target.

As for the digital age and me, we go back to its beginnings. A 1984 D.C. bar magazine pictures me on the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court with the first model of the Macintosh computer.

I demonstrated the benefit of the computer to my colleagues. One said, that it is not dignified for lawyers to be at a keyboard. Others were slow to adapt.

Attitudes change. Photocopiers entered law offices in the 1960’s. Eventually, this gave rise to the mountain of papers now routinely produced in discovery responses but not possible previously.

One-line correcting electronic typewriters came into my life in the 1970’s. This reduced the anxiety of dealing with a typographical error on a page or within a document, a considerable achievement that is difficult to grasp unless experienced in the minutes before the clock moves to the last minutes before heading to the court to file a pleading. Today, electronic filing with courts produces its own anxieties because some of the systems are clunky, others are not intuitive.

Eventually, email, the internet, and electronic libraries. A lawyer no longer needed a library nor even a secretary. A few years ago, my proudest home office boast was that I had a secretary whom I never met during a three year period and who lived about ten miles away, outsourcing within the United States. Now, I hear of secretarial work performed anywhere in the world.

Each lifetime experiences change. When I was a child in the late 1930’s and the 1940’s, I still heard stories about the impact of the introduction of the first automobiles in a community. Even in my memory, traveling by passenger airplane was not commonplace. Boarding an airplane was as easy as going into a movie theater. That ended in 1970 when Yasser Arafat and the PLO hijacked four airplanes, took them to the Jordanian desert and destroyed three of them. Airport security followed and has consistently expanded. Today we talk about full body, digitized scanning at airports. Not all change arises from positive experiences.

I am comfortable with many of the technologies applicable to the practice of law, including time keeping, billing, electronic legal research, smartphones, Skype, online banking, outlining programs, speech recognition, scheduling and calendaring, teleconferencing, team editing online, optical character recognition, deposition processing, and lawyers demonstrating a lack of civility in exchanges by email, to name a few.

Just now, I am working on developing my own web site. Why would a lawyer in his seventh decade of life want a web site ? I want to offer my experience in a particularized manner, to lawyers and clients to be their coach, conduct impartial inquiries, or to serve as a Delphic Oracle and Sage. I still like to walk into a courtroom like a barrister and try a case. I do not want to spend years in preparing motions and fighting discovery. Will the economics work, I don’t know. Obviously, I think that it is worth the investment. The digitized world makes all this possible and more.

David Epstein is an attorney who is reinventing the legal profession.  If he can do it, why can’t you?