Archives for October 2012

With fall’s colors sprinkled among our forests, it’s a good time to share a summer’s worth of webinars and presentations. Follow the links to view the programs and articles.

July  brought Technology Guided Drafting and Review,  a webinar devoted to the tools that help lawyers drafting transactional documents maintain the accuracy and completeness of complex negotiated documents in practices pressed for time and fees.  The webinar illustrated and expanded on the discussion in the white paper Technology Guided Drafting from Opportunity to Imperative. Both webinar and white paper feature the new product from Microsystems, Eagle EYE, The Agreement Checker. It has been a great pleasure to work with the team at Microsystems to learn about this product and to  help to explain it to lawyers and their staff. Precise drafting requires careful and exact use of language throughout each agreement and often among many agreements. Speaking to my colleagues and friends who continue to bear responsibility for this work, the kind of computer guided help that assists drafting by our friends in architecture and engineering. These presentations develop the theme that with a program such as EagleEYE, lawyers drafting agreements can be assisted and protected by similar technology guidance.

August. Leading up to the ILTA Conference at the end of August, I had the pleasure of working with Glynn Fluitt and Kenneth Henry of Cravath, Swaine and Moore as well as David Neesen at Greenberg Glusker and  Toby Adamson at Microsystems. One of the best parts of preparing workshops for the ILTA Conference is the chance to develop and present ideas together. Our workshops, Metadata – Deal with It! and The iPad as Laptop Replacement? gave us a chance to challenge listeners with refreshed perspectives on familiar and not so familiar technology of metadata and the opportunities and risks associates with the surging interest and use of iPads.

September  brought another webinar, You Let What Go Out? – Protecting Today’s Transactional Lawyer. Presented by American Lawyer Media with Lynn Frances of e-Discovery Writer and Bonnie Reid of Microsystems, the webinar looked at trends in practice and the risks and opportunities associated with technology guided drafting, mobile and tablet based computing and metadata management.

In the mail in the last week of September, the Probate and Property publication of the American Bar Association’s Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Section featured iPads and iPhones: Tools for Practice. This article offers insights into the experience and use of the iPad and iPhone as practice tools for lawyers, with special emphasis on the work of property and probate lawyers. It explores the potential for Evernote as a tool for field work and due diligence, highlighting the use of geotagging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reopening a conversation

A blog can | should liberate one’s mind and fingers to express thoughts that matter, to share ideas tested and untested. I hope to reopen in this blog the online and in person conversations that began some years ago when Woody’s Office Watch published my columns called “The Word of Law.”

This renewed conversation began this year with webinars and presentations at ILTA (the International Legal Technology Association.

Enabling

My interest and commitment to technology has always been to help lawyers and those who support them. Technology must serve the practice of law. Perhaps (not so perhaps?),  technology seems to govern, to demand, to overwhelm. We technology evangelists must remember to remind ourselves of our responsibility to serve.

Here “enabling ” should be read as a strong positive – techniques, tools, strategies that support the practice of law instead of overgrowing, even crowding it out.

Why  rethis and rethat?

It seems to be the right time, personally, professionally and in the industry for fresh thought about technology and the practice of law. As a profession and industry (and personally), we have pursued technology’s application to the practice for a human generation. What the equivalence in technology generations might be is harder to measure. Moore’s Law would measure the generations (doublings) since the dawn of legal technology (let’s call it 1976) at  24.

We want to become unstuck – to find and use the tools, techniques and strategies for technology that, in the words of Apple’s Human Interface Principles are “beautiful, intuitive, compelling” and not “unattractive, convoluted or illogical.” We buy and become emotionally attached to iPads in ways that have long eluded us when using technology for our practice.

For that to happen, it is time to rethink, to re-enable the tools, and especially the ways we use technology to practice law. I hope my voice will make that our story now.

Bob Blacksberg
October 1, 2012