The ABA has released the results of its 2009 Legal Technology Survey Report. This survey, now more than a decade old, provides the most comprehensive overview of trends in legal technology. Some of the highlights are reported here.
The biggest surprise to me is found in the following two items:
Social networking for personal use is gaining popularity among lawyers. 43% of respondents said they maintain a personal social networking presence. That’s up from 15% last year.
When asked whether their firms maintain a presence in an online community/social network such as Facebook, LinkedIn, LawLink or Legal OnRamp, overall 12 percent of respondents report affirmatively, up from 4% in the 2008 survey.
Perhaps I am higher up on the mortality table than the average attorney, but I am quite surprised at the rapid growth in personal social networking. The proportion nearly tripled in one year. I would expect new lawyers to be heavily involved in personal social networking but the growth is so rapid it has to mean that lots of older lawyers are getting involved as well.
The second item is even more curious. While the growth in firm participation in social networks has been just as rapid as the individual (roughly 300% in both cases), the base is still quite small.
Perhaps firm presence requires resources that only the larger firms can provide, but if 40% of the individual attorneys have a Facebook page or the like, how hard can it be for a firm to do the same thing?
I wonder what other barriers exist to firm participation.
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Strategy Development
Thomson Reuters, Legal
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There are well over 1,000,000 English language lawyers in the world.
Of those, there are two who also write seriously about the future of law as a process and a profession: Richard Posner and Richard Susskind. Posner writes on all known subjects, but the future of law is Susskind’s specialty.
Posner’s last book that focused on the legal profession was titled Overcoming Law. Susskind’s new book is titled The End of Lawyers.
There seems to be a theme here.
Susskind expanded on that theme at the International Law and Technology Association meeting last month in suburban Washington, D.C. A quick summary: it is time to eat your young.
Susskind sees an increasingly strong pull from customers towards more pre-packaged legal solutions and an even stronger pull towards avoidance of legal issues entirely. He sees, as did Posner before him, that what used to be legal work is increasingly being transferred to knowledge workers and even to DIY solutions by clients themselves.
But all is not dark in Susskind’s world. He lays out clear paths that firms (and vendors) might follow to more closely meet client’s expectations and sees such steps as avoiding ultimate commoditization.
There is still value in that JD diploma, but retaining that value will require most lawyers to break out of their comfort zones.
The ones who do that first seem most likely to win.
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Strategy Development
Thomson Reuters, Legal
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Editor’s note: Prior to joining The Thomson Corporation in 1994, Denis Hauptly served in a variety of positions in the Federal Courts and the United States Department of Justice including Special Master for the United States Court of Federal Claims and Director of Judicial Education for the Federal Courts.
(Photo courtesy: U.S. Supreme Court)
Sometime in the next few days, David Souter will arrive at his home in New Hampshire. He will be 70 years old, a wealthy bachelor, and a veteran of 20 years on the Supreme Court of the United States. What’s next for him?
The answer is that it is pretty much up to him. He will have an office in the Cleveland Building in Concord, New Hampshire with the other federal judges in New Hampshire. He will also have an office at the Supreme Court if he wants one. Or he can use one of the retired Justice chambers in the Thurgood Marshall Building a few blocks from the Supreme Court if he chooses.
He will draw a salary of about $200,000 a year for the rest of his life since he remains a federal judge and his salary cannot be changed under the Constitution. He will have an administrative assistant and a couple of law clerks and the right to sit as a federal judge in any court that invites him. All of the courts of appeals will immediately issue invitations.
But he is likely to spend most of his judicial time with the First Circuit in Boston, the court he briefly belonged to before being nominated to the Supreme Court. He has made very clear that New England is his love and the trip from Concord to Boston is a short one.
Some retired justices have also done commission work. Justice Powell chaired a commission on habeas corpus and Justice O’Connor is an evangelist for civics education.
But these roles do not seem to be an easy fit for the shy man from New Hampshire, he seems more likely to sit with the First Circuit a couple of times a year and one or two of the other circuits once a year.
Whatever route he chooses, the White Mountains will be close and the endless pressures of the Supreme Court will be a long distance away.
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Strategy Development
Thomson Reuters, Legal
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I am a little obsessed with the issue of talent. I see it as the key to innovation. I have colleagues who are polite when I spout off on this but who feel very strongly that environment is the key factor or that innovation can be fostered by appropriate processes and team structures.
Fortunately for the world, but unfortunately for my position, we all have our own success stories.
But, just to make me happy, let’s assume I am right and talent is the biggest part of an innovative effort. How does that knowledge help us?
Talent is like weather – everybody talks about it but it’s really pretty hard to do anything about. Creative talent – innovation talent- is a hard thing to pick out.
There are people who think out of the box but who also think out of the universe. They are too far ahead of or too far removed from customers to have implementable notions. Then there are the everyday creatives – an underestimated group – people who regularly make incremental improvements in products or processes that add up to big wins when they cumulate.
But there is a third group: the paradigm shifters. These people see the same thing in a different way and can change the whole game very quickly. How do we find them?
There is no course in school in paradigm shifting and, if there was, it would be a failure. It is hard to imagine using rigorous methods to produce people who think outside the existing norms.
Two challenges:
1. Think about the people you know who fit into this 3rd group. What is different about them? What are the signs?
2. Come up with a contest that would identify them. What challenge would you pose? How would it be judged?
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Strategy Development
Thomson Reuters, Legal
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The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court is the public tip of a very large iceberg of activity that has really just begun.
While U.S. Senate staff and interest groups will have been vetting her for weeks, there is a lot more ahead. Just the tax return review is enough to drive a sane person crazy.
As one who has observed the process up close – as a longtime associate of a nominee present in chambers when the vetting was taking place – I can say that she will be relieved if she is confirmed because her workload will drop dramatically after confirmation.
Every item on her tax returns for a decade or more will be questioned. Every financial transaction will be analyzed. Her former law clerks and law school classmates will be summoned to help sort through her opinions for the past 15 years to see where questions may come from and to prepare quick responses.
The invasion of privacy will be total and no one will give her the benefit of the doubt.
Essentially, if she hasn’t been preparing for this for a decade or more, she will be under enormous pressure just to compile and organize the paper.
The job is enormously prestigious and powerful of course, but should it be limited only to those whose desire for it is greater than their desire to live their own lives – free from fear that the entire world will open their medicine cabinet?
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Strategy Development
Thomson Reuters, Legal
More information:
The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times
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On April 3 the Iowa Supreme Court issued its opinion in the gay marriage case. Within four hours, 1.56 million unique users had accessed the court’s Web site. That’s an extraordinary number of hits for any site but for that many people to access a 65 page opinion that’s an incomprehensible number.
I will take it as a given that not all of these people read the opinion or even much of it, but if only 5% did, that is probably more people than have read Marbury v. Madison in 200 years.
It is of some note that in reading the opinion, the Iowa court clearly was aware that the opinion would be controversial and of interest to the general public. It went to unusual lengths to deliver an accessible opinion and certainly that is a public good. But maybe there is something more here.
Obviously access to primary law materials has increased dramatically with the Internet. And I am told by an authority on the subject that the number of legal journalists is declining with some speed. They are being replaced to some degree by bloggers but those tend to be niche, lawyer-oriented and lacking in access to the parties or lawyers.
So we have an increasing public access to judicial opinions and a decrease in the skilled mediators who can explain those opinions to a lay audience. That’s a bad situation. I wonder, and I toss it out in particular to any judges who might be out there, if this will change the way courts write opinions – at least in major cases.
Opinions were once written for the parties and now are written for the bar and bench.
But if the biggest audience is the general public (in a class of cases) should courts or legal publishers take cognizance of this and how would they do that?
Denis Hauptly
Vice President, Technology Strategy
Thomson Reuters Global Resources
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The U.S. Constitution is one of the most powerful and impactful documents in existence. It literally touches every American’s life, and has since its creation in 1787. Recently, I had the opportunity to view the document first-hand as part of a new exhibit, “We the People: The First Official Printing of the U.S. Constitution,” sponsored [...]
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We’ve got a great episode for you this month, kicking off with our “Chaos in the Courts” segment that, believe it or not, is yet another story about the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas. Since our March podcast, another person has fallen victim to the establishment’s trademark bypass burger.
Then in our “On the Blawgs” [...]
