What is the Henkel restriction?

• Author: Abadin, Ramon A.
• Position: Restrictions challenging legal practice - President's page

In the caves deep under Florida's Ginnie Springs, a paradise to divers like me, you eventually hit the Henkel restriction.

If it's your first time there, it tests your courage, as you face a passage more than 3,000 feet into the underwater cave. It tests your resourcefulness and training, as you remove your tank and push it ahead of you to squeeze through a very narrow opening. It tests your trust in the technology necessary to get you there and let you return safely to the opening.

But if you want to enjoy the rewards that lie beyond the Henkel, you first must make it there and through the opening.

As I begin my year as president of The Florida Bar, the legal profession faces its own Henkel restriction.

We face obstructions from outdated rules, inflexible systems, and our own unwillingness to take advantage of the changes technology is forcing on the legal profession. We must remove impediments to creativity and look for opportunities to better serve our customers and give them access to their legal system.

What stands in our way?

The first is the burden of rules, some left over from the horse-and-buggy days, imposed by the Bar and the courts. As my colleague at Sedgwick LLP, Valerie Shea, wrote 12 years ago, "The crushing load of rules under which we labor has not made the civil justice system more moral, more ac cessible, or more predictable."

We need a soup-to-nuts review of The Florida Bar, its structure, its rules, and the rulemaking process.

We must emerge from our silos and look at the entire legal profession--in Florida, the U.S., and the world. If we're going to succeed as a profession, we have to think beyond "my area of law" or "my committee." In fact, we need to stop thinking that only lawyers understand and can solve the complexities of the law. With the crisis of access to justice and the emergence of nonlegal service providers who are happy to help our customers, lawyers can't stifle access with high costs, complicated rules, and an unwillingness to change.

Perhaps most important, we need to embrace technology and use it as a tool to better serve our customers.

Our last three Florida Bar presidents--Gwynne Young, Eugene Pettis, and Greg Coleman--saw how technology was affecting our profession. Thanks to their foresight, the Bar began preparing for that change, with the Vision 2016 commission.

Now we know what we're facing. Now is the time to change--or not.

Emerging technologies promise to displace us from our traditional...