Technology Forum Meeting - Transcript of Discussions - Page 9  <<   >>

MR. SIENKO: So you think e-filing will be one of the incentives for George to do more than play Solitaire?

MR. GLEASON: Yes.

MR. SIENKO: What other incentives do we need for George to -- poor George.

MR. GLEASON: Here is another thing I think lawyers mostly want from our association: They want to use the tools for what they're good at, but not for what some other tool is better. For example, email is very effective for some types of communication, but for other types, the phone is far better and we still use it. But email and internet notifications have an important place in the future. What people get really benefit out of, I think, is sitting in a room with other lawyers. Like everyone else, lawyers need opportunities for face-to-face meetings, and setting them up and getting information out to facilitate those meetings, so it's easy for people to come and have a productive discussion, is very important. Lawyers in my era started out with a Special Term. It was a great thing, a motion term where dozens, perhaps hundreds of motions were called in a morning. It was great not so much because you got a lot of work done. In fact, I remember feeling very guilty sometimes, sitting, cooling my heels for hours-on-end while all the nonsense bill-of-particulars motions were being handled by consent orders. But something else was happening that I didn't realize at the time. I didn't see this clearly until years after Special Term was abolished with advent of the Individual Assignment System: I realized that when you hung out at Special Term, you learned things from people, and talked to people, and you settled cases, and did many other things that were not on the calendar. I think the Internet, as an informational tool, can facilitate face-to-face meetings of particular, even narrow interest. And the bar association, if it uses that in an effective way, will really find people will find our home page is the place to go to find out about that stuff, and that will help.

MS. DALTON: I had a comment. You were talking a lot about litigators. I'm a sole practitioner but a corporate lawyer so that electronic filing doesn't relate to me at all. What would draw me in would be the education that I could get and the chat room aspect. But it would have to be more specialized in an area I would really be interested in; not all of health law, but in particular, for instance, I deal with a lot of contracts with doctors, dentists, and nurses. That kind of specialized sub-categories within the Health Law Section which are -- I could be part of a group where I could shoot a question out
"What do you think about this in a contract? Do you think it would fly?" And I could get a response back that would be timely enough.

MR. SIENKO: Would you feel comfortable posting that on a discussion group that was behind a password? In other words, go to the Health Law Section. You log in. And then you go to the discussion group, and you put in whatever your user name is, and you post that question "Does anybody have a contract for doctors with a noncom petition provision that they know was tested that will actually stand the test of court review?"

MS. DALTON: It's not so much a section of a contract I'm looking for so much. It may be a particular issue or idea I want to bounce off of someone. And that is actually what I get a lot from the continuing legal education seminars I go to. In fact, when I did my pre-registration, I had 60 hours I had gone to; 60 hours all well spent. Not only did I learn, but I had an opportunity to bounce ideas off of people. And a lot of times my gut feeling was correct, but it confirmed my gut feeling that, in fact, that was the way to go.

MR. SIENKO: The New York State Bar Association has had for a number of years a mentoring program. Do you think the mentoring program could be done effectively by an electronic version?

MS. DALTON: I'm not familiar with the mentoring program.

MR. SIENKO: It's experienced attorneys who volunteer in specialized areas to give advice to other attorneys who call upon them.

MR. SZEKERES: That's an interesting idea.

MS. DALTON: Yeah, it's an interesting idea. And most of the time it's an issue I've dealt with before, so it's not an area where I don't know something, because I'm not -- it's peer contact. It's what I had in a bigger law firm.

MS. THARP: Where you go in your partner's office and talk about it.

MS. DALTON: In a 30-second exchange, that sort of thing.

MR. SIENKO: "That's over in that file drawer. We did that three years ago."

MS. DALTON: Or do you remember how to do this? I was thinking of continuing education as a means of getting people in. Draw them to the web site where the education is given out, but filtered so that it's time-efficient enough, yet still provide that opportunity for sole practitioners to bounce an idea off someone. Not just throwing it back there and hope to get it back in a week because you may not be timely enough.

MR. LEVIN: I would like to add to that. I think Alisa Dalton is on the track of a good idea. I belong to a group like that with one of the ABA sections where exactly that kind of thing occurs, people who have a question on a particular area of law just throw it out and start getting responses back from everybody. There must be 40 e-mails a day that go through this group, and it comes out, fortunately, in a digest so you don't have to read all 40 of them.

MR. SIENKO: You have a mechanical suggestion that the larger groups we have need a digest?

MR. LEVIN: This is getting back to what I said this morning. This is a member-only feature of a particular section of ABA. This is something that we have the ability to do with our new web site to have exactly that kind of thing going on within our sections or committees; or we can use it to offer the mentoring program as you suggested, Len.

One of the problems you have sometimes with these groups when you throw an idea out is you don't know who you're getting an answer from. You know the name and e-mail address of the person, but you have no idea what knowledge or background or what validity it is they put out. They could be the 14-year-old lawyer that you were talking about. The advantage of doing it through a password web site area of some sort is you do have some assurance that the people who are in that group are people who have a particular interest in that area. They concentrate their practice in it or enough of it that they have some idea what they're talking about, and you should be able to tell rapidly from the nature of the responses you get whether they have an idea what they're talking about.

MR. SIENKO: Internet credibility is the thing I talk about in my classes, my students about; is it a reliable source?

MR. LEVIN: I was going to talk about that this morning. We were talking about all the information available on the Internet. One of the problems which may have caused Britannica to be gone is that all this information is out there. But, there's an equal amount of misinformation out there; maybe a greater amount.

MR. SIENKO: I have a number of foreign students, and they had to do a research paper, and I'm reading through it, and it says, "And the Bush bombing of Brazil in response to the terrorism," and I'm going, "Wait a minute." And I went back, and it's an Internet quote, and the student who was a foreign student didn't understand she was quoting from a satirical site. It was like “Mad Magazine”. And they didn't understand that. So, we had a long lecture on credibility. It's more likely credible if it comes from Cornell Law School than from Mad.

MR. LEVIN: If you had the Encyclopedia Britannica site, you knew it was a reliable source because they had a reputation which is behind whatever information was. You have the same problem magnified a thousand fold on the Internet in that there are all sorts of providers and you have no idea who they are.

MR. SIENKO: Aren't you talking about something Richard Martin (NYSBA Marketing Director) is really involved in, and that is branding? Isn't that authenticating information?

MR. LEVIN: The value of any professional association is that it can bring some credibility to the information and material that it offers. So it has that extra component to it which, I think, is something you sell to people to join: You join here, you're getting information that's valuable, accurate, reliable, useful; not just something that came off somebody's fictitious web site.

MR. SIENKO: David's point earlier, which, I think, is one of the main points of our entire discussion, this content has got to bubble up from the bottom. Our biggest resource is our 70,000 members; right?

MR. LEVIN: We have sections and committees that turn out newsletters and informational material all the time for use within the section only area. Some put things out for public use as well. And there's no reason why they can't have that kind of arrangement.

MR. SIENKO: Are we going to need to make it available on the site behind the password only, or are we going to have to push it under their desktop in some other format?

MR. LEVIN: Personally I would like to see several different levels. I would like to see the web site have public information on it that attracts people in and persuades lawyers who look at it, "Gee, this is a good place to go, because behind this public information is all sorts of password protected information. If I were a member, I would have access to that as well."

Another service that we could provide for members and not non-members is digesting of opinions as they come out, so people pre-registered for particular areas of law will automatically get bulletins in their particular areas of interest. That would be a tremendous thing to sell to people as members.

MS. LEBER: Along Tom's line, several weeks ago, the ABA started the Public Information Section on the 'Net. I actually haven't seen it yet, but I think that one of the -- it was combined into interesting areas like how to select a lawyer with basic information the public should know. I think our web site could be an interesting place for the bar association to influence the public’s image of the profession. Once the public begins to accept lawyers as being more of a helping profession, the profession may actually gain in stature. I think we should be providing the public with free information. I'm a big believer in that.

The one thing I think we could address, and I'm not sure how, is the question of law firm management. I think that there's real issues for practitioners who either have a small firm, medium-sized firm, large firm, you name it: People need to chat and to hear what the issues are. I believe the profession, in terms of economies of scale, increases in economies of scale, increases in pay, everything from workplace issues, human resource issues, to how do I get the right kind of equipment? How do I find it? I think those kinds of law firm management issues really impact a person's ability to start a law firm, pay law firm debt, and I think there should be something devoted to that in the web site. And that's not something that it was a section thing. It's a kind of across the board. People really need guidance.

MR. SIENKO: Twenty-four years ago there was a state bar association seminar on how to start a law practice. And it told you the nuts and bolts of opening a file, keeping index cards at the time because there were no computers, how to manage your files, and I still use the same system, and I paid $90 for that seminar 24 years ago. I haven't seen anything like that. But maybe there is an Internet equivalent or a computer equivalent of how to start your computerized law office.

MS. LEBER: How do you do a budget? What do you look for? How much do you really need? How many secretaries you need to hire? The whole thing. I think people really need to know what's involved.

MR. SZEKERES: Back to the thread of discussion issue, I was just going to share with you what we've done at Cleary. One of the most successful things was in our Securities and Merger and Acquisitions practice, which is a very large chunk of our business. We created in Lotus notes a community, where people could go in and used to be, you know, you sent an e-mail out to a list and said "Has anybody dealt with this issue?" And hopefully when the people read the e-mail, there is somebody who is actually in the office that day that can read it, and people are looking for a fast answer, what would happen, they would send an e-mail back, "Yes, this is what we did in this situation," incorporated it through their e-mail, and deleted it; right? Then two days later your colleague down the hall had the same question and started the whole process over.

What we did is created these threaded discussions and archived them, except very quickly you have all other discussions on other topics, and you can never find anything. What was critical was to have a gatekeeper, somebody who would go through and say, "All right. These guys are talking about having lunch next week. That can be deleted. And this is" -- we've created a categorization scheme, and the gatekeeper goes through and makes sure things are categorized in the proper way so that suddenly when you have this vast archive of really useful information, there's a coherent way of locating that information. And I think that the sections, if they go this route, will have to have people who, just like you have people who put the newsletter together, will spend a percentage of their time making sure that the stuff remains coherent and well-categorized; otherwise, it just becomes a lot of noise again with everything else.

MR. LEVIN: You need a list mom.

MR. SIENKO: A list mom on the other end. For those of you who didn't grow up with UseNet, what we're talking about is threaded discussions were either moderated or un-moderated. Un-moderated, you had flame wars; people would go off topic and attack. Moderated, you had someone called a “list mom” keep everybody in line and would select which posts were going and which weren't and enforce standards about what kinds of things were able to be said on the list. That's what Tom Levin is talking about when he says "list mom." What John is talking about is editing the archive just before it goes into permanent status.

MR. LEVIN: That's assuming what we're talking about is going to be something that has a permanent status aspect to it. I think in the law firm, I think clearly there's an advantage to doing that, but I'm not so sure for the kind of thing we're talking about, where you want to have ongoing constant discussion. I'm not sure you really need to do that. But you do need to keep the discussion on track.

MR. SZEKERES: It's the same thing as mentoring where, if you become part of this mentoring program, then you have a place to go to maybe see if --

MR. LEVIN: If I could back up, that was the other thing mentioned before, talked about earlier, the mentoring. There are two ways you could do this with this kind of system. You could simply allow anyone who needs to get some advice to go onto this vast resource we have and throw out a question and get responses. You're going to have the problem of not knowing who you're getting a response from.

If you have the present mentoring system structure put into the Internet. The people who agree to be mentors and are qualified to be mentors are the ones who receive the questions and then respond. I think that's a great way to do it. Basically that's what the mentoring usually involves. It's somebody needing to be pointed in the right direction and given a push, "This is the way to go. Go to it," and, "Watch out for the bears," you know.

MR. SIENKO: Most of the mentoring has involved reassuring somebody doing the right thing.

MS. DALTON: My comment is, I think, what I would be looking at, as a sole practitioner, which would help anyone starting is community. In fact, a bigger one is often worse because there are too many people and no one accountable. Too much time might pass before a response is received. The law firm, when you're talking about a bigger law firm like yours, has a community, and it's built in. So, instead of maybe a mentoring program, maybe small sort of clusters of sort of community-based clusters could be formed among peers like you were saying Chris where it's not so much, you know, being qualified. You may know your qualifications and the people and, you know, in fact, maybe there is some distance location wise between them, so you make sure you're not responding to someone else's issue who may be on the other side of a deal. That's one thing that can be created in a small community such as where I'm living right now.

MR. LEVIN: You never know who is reading -- just lurking.

MS. DALTON: If there are 50 people in my group and someone throws a question out there "Do you have to have a grant of security interest in security agreement?" And I type back, "Oh, yeah. You have to have this kind of language," that person I'm giving the advice to may be on the other side. You know what I'm saying? I don't really know who I'm giving an answer to. So if, instead, you have a small cluster of lawyers, you know who the people are, that person comes in on another side of the deal, you know you're not supposed to respond to that person's questions.