Digital Values?Ingredients for Our New Story

• Author: Adam Newhouse
• Pages: 103-120

103

CHAPTER 12

Digital Values—Ingredients

for Our New Story

The new legal landscape we confronted following the Great Recession

need not be all that frightening once we connect to and feel at home in

the cultural environment in which it has emerged. In this new environ-

ment, a new set of values and norms of behavior is now replacing old

social values that were essential to success.

Take a traditional corporation with its hierarchical command system

that emphasizes individual performance while allowing little room for

freedom of expression or disagreement. The old culture caters to com-

petitive instincts of individuals who guard their entitlements, accom-

plishments, and authority and hoard fruits of their labor. No one is safe.

Everything they say and do can (and will) be taken against them. Such

culture may have produced high-performing individuals but often left

them bitter and alienated from the group.

The digital culture embraces opposite values. It is a counterculture

challenging the old system. It fosters an active and equal participation

in online activities, stressing initiative and collaboration in achiev-

ing results and inviting free and open communication and feedback.

The old judgmental intolerance is out the window. Democracy is not

an empty word anymore: the voice of each netizen carries weight and

implicit respect.

Digital Virtues—Code of Ethics

of Digital Natives

What an extraordinary period in human history this is—for the

first time the next generation coming of age can teach us how to

ready our world for the future. . . . Learn from them and you will

see the new culture of high-performance work, the twenty-first-

century school and college, the innovative corporation, a more open

new55202_12_ch12_103-120.indd 103 7/8/16 12:52 PM

104 e-LAWYER

family, a democracy where citizens are engaged, and perhaps even

the new, networked society.265

—Don Tapscott

Upon coming to his 16-year old son’s room, Benedict Gross, a

former Dean of Harvard College, found him doing his homework

while engaged in five IM conversations all at once. “How can you

get work done when you have five conversations going?” he asked.

“Dad, you don’t understand,” his son answered. “This is how we

communicate. For us, IM is like email was when you were a kid.”

“If five conversations are open at once,” asks Mark Chandler, Cisco’s

general counsel, “how do you bill the time?”266

In the redefined legal landscape, many lawyers are nervously running

in circles like trapped animals looking for a way to escape. Our old

story does not sell anymore. We desperately need a new one to stay in

business and attract new clients.

The threat of Google, LexisNexis, and other providers of legal infor-

mation and services encroaching on traditional legal domains puts

us on the defensive. Accounting firms are chomping at the bit to take

whatever else we may still have left to offer our clients. But trying to

requalify as accounting consultancies is hardly a way out of our cur-

rent fix. In fact, reacting this way is likely to play into the hands of those

accounting firms and other legal providers, as they likely do their job

better than we do.

In order to stay relevant as legal professionals, we must first be rel-

evant in the context of the digital environment. Unless we understand

how to succeed as digital citizens, our skills and resources offer little

value to the business community. True, our skills cannot be commod-

itized so easily, but to make them useful, we must deliver them in a way

congruent with the mores of the new economy.

A study of digital mores will reveal what it takes to succeed in

today’s culture. It will give us new tools to create a new story of our

profession—a digital story and the only story clients want to hear.

265. Tapscott, Grown Up Digital (cited in note 232) at 8.

266. Mark Chandler, Luncheon Speech on the State of Technology in the Law given

on Jan. 25, 2007 in San Diego, CA, at 34th Ann. Conf. of the Sec. Reg. Inst. of NW L. Sch.,

quoted in John Earnhardt, Cisco General Counsel on State of Technology in the Law, Cisco

Blog—The Platform (Jan. 25, 2007), http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_general_counsel

_on_state_of_technology_in_the_law (visited Mar. 31, 2016).

new55202_12_ch12_103-120.indd 104 7/8/16 12:52 PM