President's Column
| Publication year | 2014 |
| Pages | 1 |
| Citation | Vol. 40 No. 2 Pg. 1 |
Summer, 2014
Facing the Digital Future
David Fenster, Esq.
Last issue I wrote about changes and challenges that will shape the future of the practice of law, legal education, the courts, and Chief Justice Reiber's address at the VBA mid-year meeting. Since that writing, the VBA Board of Bar Managers has held its annual retreat and discussed these issues at length. The discussion covered topics as varied as the impact of technology on the profession, legal education and the entry of new attorneys into the legal field, the courts and access to justice, and providing legal service to populations that are not currently represented by counsel. It was an important discussion and the first steps of a conversation about how we, as the VBA, want to meet these challenges and answer the chief justice's call to action.
In this issue I want to address another aspect of the changes and challenges that we face: the move into the digital age. The digital information age affects the law itself and creates many new questions for attorneys in practice. Modern computers and related technologies are driving fundamental changes in many areas of the practice of law. Is there an area of the law where technology has not had an impact? Today, we generate our documents on word processors, review and revise them on screens, save different versions, track changes within them, email them, print and scan them. Contracts are created with a single click over the Internet. Legal research is conducted online. Certificates for the Service-members' Civil Relief Act of 2003 can be obtained online.[1] How long before land records are available online? How long before future title searches are conducted from any office by computer or on a cell phone? Today, a "click" can constitute a signature.
As lawyers, what do we need to understand about this technological change to keep up with the times? For hundreds of years, the law had been a body of work contained in and primarily concerned with paper and ink. Lawyers wrote their briefs on paper. Judges wrote decisions on paper. Books were hand-scribed until the printing press. The United States Constitution, one of the greatest legal documents ever penned, was literally penned, as was the Declaration of Independence. What if the Declaration of Independence had been written on a word processor and circulated with track changes? What if the signers of the Declaration of Independence had clicked "agree" on an online Declaration of Independence? Imagine /s/John Hancock...
Aside from the questions about how this would affect the look and feel of these legal documents, these questions have real world legal consequences for our modern documents. It is fairly straightforward when an attorney adds an electronic signature to a motion electronically filed in a court. But what...
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