Ernie The Attorney

New Orleans premier of 'The Blind Side'

I absolutely loved the book. And I love Sandra Bullock for her strong, but quiet, assistance to Warren Easton Charter High School, which struggled to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Sandra Bullock has raised a lot of money, and has visited the high school several times --never with a media entourage.  The movie premier is at a small neighborhood theatre here, and all the proceeds will to to Warren Easton high school.

Among the dignitaries that will attend the premier is Michael Lewis, the author of The Blind Side.  As many of you know he's from New Orleans too.  A few years ago I got a chance to ask him a question, something that perplexed me about an important scene in the book. It was a strange encounter, and I'm still laughing about it to this day.

I don't know if the movie is any good, but I hope that it does well.  It's a great story and Sandra Bullock is a wonderful woman (and a great actress).

Business cards?

Awhile back I did a post on rethinking business cards. It spawned a lot of great comments.  In fact the comments probably have more useful information than the post itself.

Another reason why lawyers write excruciatingly long sentences

There are so many reasons why lawyers write those tedious run-on sentences, but let's focus on one that probably afflicts my generation more than the more newly minted lawyers.  How many people regularly use the 'Digests'?  You know, the headnotes maintained by West that are filled with blurbs about legal principles.

Anyway, I'm at the Fifth Circuit law library (availing myself of their West books, and the free wifi), and I was reminded of something about the digests that's really strange.  The digests have a convention about how they're written that encourages lawyers to write long-winded sentences. 

Can anyone guess what it is?  I'll let the comments roll in and we'll see who guesses right first.  The winner will get an invite to Google wave.

Google now helps with legal research

I've long contended that the law should be available online for free.  Seems fitting and proper, since 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' and all.  If you can't claim you didn't know what the law is, then shouldn't the government at least make the law available online for free?

In Louisiana, where I live, the statutory law is available online for free.  Our state government has wisely taken that important first step (the site is not exactly a model of usability, however).  But what about caselaw, which is to say: written decisions handed down by courts?  Often it's not enough to read a statute to know what the law is.  You might have to read some cases to see how the statute was interpreted by the courts.  Shouldn't that kind of law also be available online for free?

As a member of the Louisiana bar association I get access to something called Fastcase, which is an online legal research service.  It's free to me as a Louisiana lawyer, but it's not free to anyone else.  But today, Google has taken an important first step in making legal caselaw available online.  For free. Google Scholar, which has heretofore been focused on scholarly literature, now provides access to state cases going back to 1950, and federal cases going back to 1924.  So that's at least 50 years of state and federal cases that have been reported. And you can search these databases by using text-based queries just as you would in Google.

I realize that lawyers might need to access cases that are more than 50 years old (or 80 if its federal law), so maybe this is not the perfect solution for lawyers.  But it's an interesting start.  I can envision Google adding to the database as it gets more use, which it should.  Here's why.

First, even if you have Westlaw or Lexis (or Fastcase), there are some great advantages to Google Scholar, such as dispensing with the need to login. If you're just looking for a recent case then clearly this is the way to go.  And if you want to share a link to a case that's easy to do, again because there is no login barrier. (For example, if I want to create a link to this case I now can: Atlanta Cas. Co. v. Payne, 603 So.2d 343 (Miss. 1992)). You click the link and see the case right away. How cool is that?!  

You can search by state, or pick the states that you want to search in (there is no way that I could find to restrict federal case searches to just one circuit, unfortunately).  Finally, Google Scholar has a nice way of organizing the cases you search for, displaying a tab called How Cited that lists other cases that have cited the key case and brief description of the citing language.  Very nice!

Granted, it's not perfect (did I mention that yet?).  But the point is not that Google has failed to achieve the lawyer's dream of a perfect legal research tool.  Rather it's that: Google has taken the initiative of making caselaw available for free.  Why can't the government do this? (Aapparently no one there knows about HTML and the Internet). But I'm grateful that Google has taken this step, which I hope leads to other developments that will make all caselaw available online. 

For free!

Update: I congratulate my friend Rick Klau on being part of this amazing project (using his "20% time" at Google to do it).

Wanna be a lawyer? Well, get thee to a courtroom!

The quickest way to learn the ropes of any business is to go where the rubber meets the road.  So I'll let you in on a little secret that no one knows about.  If you want to learn how to be a lawyer you need to learn how behave in court, and how to read a judge.  If you can figure out, on the fly, how to banter with a judge in open court then you can be an effective lawyer. If not, then don't fret. Clients don't usually know if you're effective (until it's too late).

So, how do you become effective as a lawyer? 

Before you attend your first law school class (and this is important, because once you start going to class you'll get lulled into thinking you're actually learning how to be a lawyer), go to court.  How do you learn how to be a lawyer?  Obvious answer: by watching lawyers do their thing.  Later you will have some sense of how to do it yourself.

So, go to court.  Park your butt in a seat and watch the lawyers come in and argue their cases.  Actually, before you watch lawyers, go watch ordinary people. You'll learn a lot by watching them too.  So, go to traffic court.  If your traffic court is anything like the one we have here in New Orleans you will not only learn, but also be entertained.

The other day I happened to be in traffic court, and I feel like I learned a lot (or maybe I was just very entertained).  Most of the cases in traffic court are handled by the assistant city attorney working out of a back office.  The CA might negotiate a lesser charge (especially if an attorney shows up, which is not the norm), but unless you have one of those kinds of cases you wouldn't know what goes on back in the 'secret room.'  Fortunately some cases get handled in open court by the judge. And this is where the entertainment comes in.

It's fascinating to watch ordinary people come into court and try to convince the judge to let them off the hook.  I watched about 10 people in a row, who had previously failed to appear in court and therefore had arrest warrants issued, try to explain their plight to the judge.  Most of them were dressed like drug dealers or prostitutes. (Tip #1: first impressions count).  None of them had thought through their 'explanations' and simply get trying to get the judge to accept that they 'just forgot' or 'didn't get the notice.'  (Tip #2: spend some time preparing a credible argument).  Even though the judge made it clear that he was not going to accept these kinds of excuses people kept stepping up with a carbon copy of the losing argument. (Tip #3: be prepared to abandon an argument that is not being well received by the judge).

Another thing that amazed me was how many people brought in cellphones and then allowed them to ring out loud.  The courtroom was festooned with signs warning about having cellphones go off.  When a cellphone would sound the judge would instruct the guard to confiscate it.  So, can you imagine?  People were going into try to get out of a $100 contempt fine, and losing both the fine AND their cellphone. (Tip #4: don't go to court if you can't follow the local rules).

You might be laughing, thinking that YOU would never do anything so stupid.  Perhaps you wouldn't.  That doesn't mean you'll be an effective lawyer.  You still have to learn how to read the judge and figure out how to craft an argument that is appealing to him or her.  And you have to do it quickly, based on all the factors that you pick up while you're in court. So, after you spend a few hours at traffic court head over to the next level state court and check out the proceedings there.  Keep working your way up the jurisdictional food chain, and take notes.  You will see some great lawyers and you will see some pathetic ones (mostly the latter).  You'll see some great judges and some mediocre ones.

Watch how the good lawyers are quick to adapt.  Notice how the mediocre ones are over-confident and inflexible.  Watch how the good lawyers deal with bad judges, especially ones that are harsh and rude. That's when you'll see something that will actually help you as a lawyer. 

Sure you have to go to law school and pay tuition.  Going to court will cost you nothing but time.  But you'll learn more by going to court and watching real proceedings than you will ever learn in law school. Even if you spend all your time in traffic court. 

I'm totally serious.

CLE seminar on paperless lawyering (New Orleans; Dec 30th)

Dane Ciolino and I will be putting on a full day seminar on paperless lawyering on December 30th.  In addition to digital workflow, the seminar will also present tips on e-discovery and use of smart phones. The seminar will provide 6 hours of CLE credit, including 1 hour of Ethics and 1 hour of Professionalism.  

The program will take place in New Orleans at the IP Building (behind the U.S. Fifth Circuit).  For more information, including registration, visit our DigitalWorkflow site.

Broken email - part 2

There were some good comments to the last post about broken email, which caused me to think a little more about what the problem is (the solution, if there is one, will require a careful description of the problem).  And the first thing to observe is that there is really more than one cause to the problem of email overload.

One factor that makes email hard to deal with is the structural underpinning of email.  We could spend a lot of time laying all of this out (and I certainly invite people to do so in the comments).  Here are a couple of quick observations: (1) email was not designed with authentication in mind (which is one reason that spam and spoofing are so easy to do), and so it makes it hard to keep out noise; (2) most email programs handle each email conversation as separate communications, and have no way of grouping related conversations together (gmail does keep related conversations together in 'threads'); (3) even in 'threaded conversations' it's not feasible to add a new participant to the conversation in a way that allows the person to read all the communications that have occurred before they got involved.

Google Wave was created with the idea of addressing these structural problems.  I have been playing with it for a few weeks, and I can see where it would be very useful in creating better structure around group conversations that are presently happening in email.  There are, of course, other ways for these kinds of group conversations to occur other than in email (i.e. online services such as Basecamp or other project management tools).  But most people think of email as the way to collaborate, and so Google Wave is trying to fix the structural problems of email so that the collaboration aspect can be improved.

It's way too early to make any assessments about Google Wave, other than the assessment that it would be more useful if more people were using it.  A collaboration tool that only a few people can use (because Google Wave is in pre-beta stage) is necessarily limited.  Welcome to 'Advanced Obviousness 101.'  

So while we are waiting for Google Wave to come out of its cocoon and then find out how much of the email overload problem it can solve what else can we focus on?

I think that the other part of the email problem is social.  It's way too easy to send someone an email, and there is no way for the sender to know how busy the recipient is when the email is sent.  Spammers don't care how busy you are, but that's another story.  The net result is that many people's email inbox is larded with communications from people who seek little bits of information.  The sender doesn't have any sense of how many of these little 'request chunks' are already taking up the recipient's time.  And time is finite, at least in the human sense of 'doing work.'

I don't know that any 'technological tool' can fix this problem.  Maybe it's possible to create a massive online status light for each person.  But are people going to accept this convention?  Are they going to modify their behavior and send people less email when they can detect that the person is busy?  I don't know the answers to these questions.  I just know that a lot of people have trouble with their email, and in many cases it's not just because they are 'poor information managers.'

When you have someone who is adept at using technology and willing to try all the techniques that help sort and filter email, and yet they still are not keeping up, then you have a problem that's not rooted in poor organization skills.  It's rooted in the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with email.  Maybe it's a technical problem, or maybe it's a problem with how everyone uses email.  

What do you think?  Do you have problems sometimes with email overload?  Have you been able to diminish the problem?  If so, how?  Do you know other people who have problems that are similar to yours?  Have you conquered the email overload problem and achieved a state of supreme bliss?  If so, please leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

Why is my email broken?

Almost everyone I know who uses email extensively for work is overwhelmed by email.  People used to talk about achieving 'in-box zero,' that triumphant (yet fleeting) moment when you go through your email inbox and process all email.  Processing email means: responding to it, forwarding it, filing it, or deleting it.  

In the old days, you could quickly go through your email inbox and delete a lot of stuff and be left with just a few things to respond to or otherwise deal with in some meaningful way.  Those days are long gone. I routinely hear people (smart, well-organized, tech-savvy people) say that they've given up on achieving 'in-box zero.'  Some people declare 'email bankruptcy,' which means that they delete all the emails in their inbox and then start from scratch.  And these are the optimists!

The pessimists have declared that they are giving up on email altogether, often opting to simply use Twitter and the phone.  Their strategy is this: communicate en masse to their Twitter followers, and DM ('direct message') those that they want to talk to directly.  And anyone else that they want to communicate with (i.e. those who don't use Twitter) they'll talk to by phone. This seems harsh, but it's even harsher when you consider that 'communicating by Twitter' means using 140 characters or less to send messages.

I am not yet a 'pessimist,' and I haven't yet declared email bankruptcy.  But I do think that email is 'broken.' Why?

Well, for starters, there are simply too many messages in my inbox to deal with everyday.  I could take up at least 30 minutes each day just deleting emails.  Filing them would add another hour to the day.  The real problem are the emails that I have to respond to.  I get at least 30 emails that require some serious response, and probably another 40 or so from people who EXPECT a response even though I can't help them, or can't help them at the time their response comes in. 

In short, I am constrained to simply not respond to a number of emails.  This makes me very uncomfortable, but I just don't have time to answer.  And even if I did, for many of these emails a response would simply generate another email back from the person with a follow up suggestion or question. 

So, if you email me and I don't respond it's not because I don't care.  It's because I have finite resources and my email situation is totally broken. If you're happy with your email situation then you are truly fortunate.  I envy you completely.  

For me, email is more burdensome than helpful. And I expect things to get worse.

New Louisiana Ethics Website!

My friend Dane Ciolino teaches Ethics at Loyola Law School in New Orleans, and specializes in legal ethics issues.  He wrote the book on Louisiana Legal Ethics, and how he has put the book online in the form of a website called Louisiana Legal Ethics.  It's free, and will be updated immediately whenever changes warrant it.

The website is optimized for mobile phones (including, of course, the iPhone) so the information is usable pretty much from anywhere you have an internet connection. The site has an RSS feed, and an email newsletter option.  And Dane has set up a Twitter feed if you want the updates delivered in the most timely fashion possible.

This site will be the go to site for Legal Ethics in Louisiana so if you're a Louisiana lawyer check it out, and bookmark it.

Podcast with Gary Reback

The TWIL podcast with Gary Reback is up on iTunes, and I encourage anyone who is interested in how law is shaping the development of technology to listen up.  Gary Reback is the author of a wonderful book called Free the Market, which describes the role that antitrust law has had in the development of new technologies.  Gary has had an amazing career, and he's a very thoughtful guy.  He's got some interesting observations about the Google book settlement (which appear at the end of the podcast).

Thanks to Denise Howell for letting me guest host the podcast in her absence, and to Brandy Karl and Rick Klau for helping me out with the podcast.