Technology Forum Meeting - Transcript of Discussions - Page 10  <<   >>

MR. SIENKO: Could what you're doing be done technically with a chat function, with an IRC, or, you know, Internet relay chat function? My understanding is the new web site is going to have a chat function; right?

MR. MIRANDA: We're going to have that capability. The focus is on discussion groups; not the chat where you're having, you know, real-time conversations.

MS. THARP: What's the difference between chat and discussion?

MR. MIRANDA: Chat is real-time, we're both on line together: What we're talking about is having a discussion group where you can post the question "I've got a -- this new case came down. How is this going to impact settlement agreements?" And then you can see a post of three or four people responding, and you can pick.

MS. THARP: Over a period of time.

MR. MIRANDA: Over a period of time you're not going to get e-mails back, you can go back to the site the next day and see what responses there are or see what questions other people have posted and see what answers there have been, and maybe there has probably been a similar question to something asked.

MR. SIENKO: She wanted to self-select, wanted to have a group that was self-selected people she could trust and exchange with, and that sounds more like a real-time chat function as opposed to the discussion group where everybody in the section reads the posts.

MR. MIRANDA: That's different.

MS. THARP: How do you know who is in the chat room?

MR. LEVIN: There's a list. The question is it's always the issue who is lurking, who is listening, like on the phone. People are there, and you don't know -- they're not participating and, for example, with the discussion groups, you have no idea who is reading material. Just be careful what you say.

MR. SIENKO: Is it safe to say there's more than one way to build a community on line? And there are different ways to do it? And probably what we are talking about here is building different communities of interest online under the state bar association. That's a thread I hear.

MR. GOLDFARB: I think no matter what you do, you have to have something between monitored and unmonitored. Even though you wouldn't have to screen every thing, we have someone coming on saying "What's everybody charging for a will in Queens County?" And somebody has to say, "You cannot discuss that. That's a violation of the antitrust laws. You cannot put that on -- that is something the New York State bar is not allowed."

MR. GOLDFARB: What I see coming up more and more in discussion groups is the issue of people who are discussing a case and other members can recognize the same case. I don't know what all the ethical considerations are.

Someone in the discussion group is talking about an incompetent client; is it a valid will and valid power of attorney, and somebody else says, "Oh, you know, that son just came in to my office on that." And that's the whole issue and I think that has to be dealt with, people discussing fact patterns, how much of that should or shouldn't be done and what's confidential.

MR. LEVIN: The same thing comes up in everyday conversation, and you want to know what you should and shouldn't say.

MR. GOLDFARB: When it's on a list and you have 500 attorneys who practice in that field, they're all going to be the ones who see parties on those cases. And in addition, it's archived.

MR. MIRANDA: Just like if you're at a, you know, meeting such as this, I think you have to use the same discretion. If it's something that's confidential, shouldn't be talked about, you shouldn't be saying it at this meeting or on line. It's the same situation.

MR. GOLDFARB: We have a lot of new lawyers who are asking about every case when they get on these lists. I'm telling you, on the Elder Law list, you can see people who discuss every client that comes in; they don't know what to do and are asking the people with more expertise what to do. It's bound to happen. I think what we need is training for the people monitoring the lists, and training for people who are participating on the lists; what to do, not to do, what kinds of discussions are appropriate.

One of the things I wanted to say that's a little different from that, the bar association might want to practice also what it's preaching. Its own policy-making decisions in the sections and at other levels, the members are usually kept in the dark about what's going on until it's final. I had to send in my own comments together with another group of lawyers to the Commission on Fiduciary Appointments, because comments from individual lawyers were due last week, and yet we don't know what the bar is doing, and you can't find out from your section or anything else about what's happening. Why not throw the doors open a little bit, let the sunshine in. Let the members know what's being discussed? Put it on the Internet. Put it on the lists or other places where the discussions are going on and policies so people can be better informed. Members who may not be that active are on lists can get in and have input to these kinds of policy functions.

MR. SIENKO: Don't we have a legislative policy-making group that consists of members of the executive committee, people with --

MR. GOLDFARB: I'm thinking within each section and everything they do.

MR. LEVIN: That's a point. We could do a lot better letting members know what's going on, what we have in the process, rather than what we've already done.

MR. SIENKO: 70,000 of us sending e-mails to Senator So-And-So?

MR. LEVIN: No. Informing members what's happening. I think we can use the web site as a faster and better way to do that. The State Bar News only comes out a certain number of times, but this can come out constantly. This is a source of daily communication for people.

MR. SIENKO: You want the news headlines to be generated in-house?

MR. LEVIN: Yes, encourage people to make our web page their home page.

MR. GOLDFARB: Or see the drafts different committees are coming up with.

MR. SIENKO: FDC privacy notices, report from the president, what he's doing on our behalf in regard to the privacy notices.

MR. LEVIN: Actually, a lot of these things are there.

MR. KRANE: Yeah, but buried.

MR. LEVIN: This could be the first thing that pops up on your page. A crawl with a bunch of other items the bar association is doing for you. Maybe that's the kind of news we're looking for.

MR. SZEKERES: We sort of did that at Cleary. One of the first things we did when I arrived is structure an intranet to provide two levels of news. One was news that was specific to the practice areas, and another more general news that sort of popped up every day with the first thing when you went in. And it talked about, you know, successes of the firm. And I think those kinds of things from the bar association, things that some gatekeeper again editor decides that these are things that the membership should really be apprised of, and that's what gets people to come in regularly.
They’re going to be most important in the entire organization. Do we want to give that authority up?

MR. SZEKERES: It's a different gatekeeper for each practice, each of the sections, and then a different gatekeeper for the bar association.

MR. KRANE: I wanted to step back a little bit. We're spending a lot of time talking about web site and what's on it and all that. And that certainly is a big part of the discussion, but to respond to comment on a few things that have been said, clearly as we found out in some focus groups over the last year, year and a half, one of the things our members crave is information on law practice management, as Bernice was saying. Over and over and over again, that's what they want us to be helping them with across the board; law practice management for senior lawyers, for lawyers running firms, or lawyers in solo practice; for junior lawyers, to educate junior lawyers about how it is that -- how is it that money comes in to pay your salary. I mean, from the point of client intake, and so on. So that's clearly something that we should have information on.

MR. SIENKO: You get salaries?

MR. KRANE: So that's one. In terms of where there should be an emphasis on providing information to the members, what it is we're doing, I don't know if I'd go so far to open up discussions on internal committee drafts. One of the things going on with the fiduciary appointments committee, they're hard at work generating their report, and their working under a tremendous amount of time pressure, and to come out with something when it's not really ready for public consumption at this point can create problems. But it's all known that they're working on it and invited comments, and in a lot of different ways, so I think we need to move more in the direction of letting the members know what's going on and the web site's the perfect place to do it.

One thought I had as we were talking about section content, and so on, is a way of drawing people into the web site and maybe getting them to use their computers more by phasing out the paper newsletters. We spend a lot of money on tons of printing and publishing and postage, for one thing. For another thing, I subscribe to a number of publications that are -- that are low budget, and over the last two or three years, they've all gone to online only and eliminated the paper copy, eliminated the hard copy of the publication, and maybe that's a way of drawing more people onto the web site, by telling them, "Look, all this great content we've been providing to you, it's still available. You just have to read it on computer. If you want to print it out, print it out, but it's going to be there. It's not going to come and sit on your desk anymore," and get people to come onto the web site. So I think those are some things we should look into.

MR. SIENKO: Steve, I think mechanically the question would be: Do we have the capability technically to have whoever is producing the newsletter for the section put that newsletter into an electronic format that could go up on the web site? I'm assuming if you're going to put it on a web site, you're going to hyperlink any citations or references then. Do we have the capability to do that?

MR. MIRANDA: We're going to have that through the relationship with LOIS. Not only are the articles going to be on line, but it's going to be better on line, because when you do have a case that's cited, you're going to be able to hyperlink that case to the LOIS database and get that case for free.

MR. KRANE: We should recommend that it should be an association policy to phase out a lot of paper publications as much as possible and put it on the web.

MR. SIENKO: You'll buy us all bulletproof vests?

MR. MIRANDA: The problem we have or the issue we have is you're going to have to be a member to get into the content. But you do have to be a section member, and some of the sections are very -- have a real proprietary feeling over their content, so if I'm a member of Intellectual Property Law Section, for some reason I want to see a state law article, am I going to be able to do that?

MR. KRANE: Maybe back issues are available.

MR. LEVIN: I want to get to another subject, but that should run the same way it runs now. If a section wants to let their material out to everybody, they can let it out to everybody. If they want to restrict it to members only, then they'll do that.

MR. SIENKO: The difference is I'm a section member, I got my hard copy of newsletter, and I walk across the hallway and I hand it to the guy who is not a section member.

MR. LEVIN: The state did that when the Department of Environmental Conservation stopped publishing the Environmental Notice Bulletin, which they're required to provide. Now they do it electronically. It’s available to everyone. Once you get it, if you want any part of it you can print it out, and you can take it down the hall and hand it to anybody you want. I have several other newsletters that work the same way.

MR. SIENKO: All I'm saying is you think the password is going to stop duplication of the section newsletter; it's not.

MR. LEVIN: No, no. I know it's not. But to get it in the first instance, you've got to be in the section. If you choose to share it, no one can do anything about that. It isn’t any different from the printed material, which goes out now to section members only.

MS. CIOFFI: I want to hearken back to the practice management issues that Bernice and Lorraine and Steve just mentioned. We have a small firm; two partners, three associates. When we started in 1995, we invested about $30,000 to get our equipment set-up. We found five years later we needed to invest another 30,000 because then we needed two servers and more things.

It would have helped me a lot if I could have -- now, I don't know if this is reasonable, so you'll have to tell me -- bought what I need secondhand. Like I'm going to assume if I'm outgrowing my equipment on an every-five-year basis, maybe other people are. And if somebody had a server that they used for a few years and they were going on to something new, could I have bought that?

MR. SIENKO: There's no market for used computer equipment. There are landfills.

MR. GOLDFARB: It's obsolete.

MS. CIOFFI: Does that happen with everybody.

MS. LEBER: You could have that question answered in ten seconds, and you wouldn't have knocked your head against the wall. That's the point of getting this on line.

MS. THARP: That's correct, you would have a source to tell you.

MS. LEBER: But that's a law office practice.

MR. SIENKO: I would have told you where you could get some online for free.

MR. GOLDFARB: I'm assuming you had a consultant come in.

MS. CIOFFI: Well, it's a salesperson coming in.

MS. LEBER: That's fundamentally one of the aspects that I think will be very helped. If we had an IT person who would be from the bar who could consult independently and who would then be in a position to help you with techie problems, then you don't have to. Everybody else doesn't have to hire.

MR. LEVIN: There are people out there who are available.

MS. LEBER: That's a management issue.

MR. GLEASON: I just had a question for the proponents of archiving, whether this is a good idea or not: It would help you to be archiving huge amounts of material, I would think. Is it helpful to have any protocols in terms of how people put information up there for questions? For example, if you're going to talk about something that has key word or statute, do it in this format so your search engines would pick it up; is that a useful thing to do?