Technology and its Indentured Servants
Let’s start with the premise that I am a very big fan of technology. I crave all tools, big or small, tangible or online, that can help me work faster and more efficiently. Drafting legal pleadings is accomplished quickly and efficiently with tablets or notebook computers armed with spellchecking, autoformating and advanced document logic that can almost create the documents for you. Typewriters have been relegated as curious primitive objects in museums. Storing your client files is now accomplished on portable hardrives instead of in steel filing cabinets. We conduct legal research wherever we want when we want online. No longer do we have to go to the firm library or the cold confines of an outside law library during office hours to page through ancient bound paper tomes. Email, eFax and all other electronic communications are the predominant method of communicating with clients and opposing counsel. Fading fast from the scene are stationary, envelopes, stamps and the mailman.
The professed purpose for all of these advances is to help make you a bigger, faster, stronger lawyer who makes more money and can go home earlier. Looking at it objectively, are we getting the benefit of the bargain from technology? Is this an instance of a better mousetrap or are we just running faster on the hamster wheel? I do not think this debate is over and in many ways it may not have even started. Let’s see if I can get it going.
Notwithstanding all the advantages of technology, I hardly think it is blasphemous to look back fondly on those days of paper, pencils and thermal fax machines. Do you remember the time when there was no email, text messages or cellular phones? Imagine the tranquility of a work day when all you had to do was answer the office telephone when you wanted and had to respond to a handful of letters from clients or opposing lawyers per day. How about the luxury of being able to respond to those written communications when you had the time to do so knowing that the senders of those communications did not expect to hear from immediately? It is funny how all of this sounds primitive and archaic now but the reality is that it was not all that long ago.
Compare those simple times to now. Today we have become slaves to multi-tasking. You can receive hundreds of emails, text messages, faxes and electronic communications daily. Worse yet, the expectation is that you need to respond to all of those communications immediately. All this in addition to the handful of written letters that you still receive each day on top of the normal daily grind work that you must churn out. As a consequence, we think and have pressure to make decisions in nanoseconds. Our communications are short, terse and in 140 characters or less. Emotions and personality we are told should be left out of the equation. Being kind is to exhibit weakness. Judgment is based on the here and now. Consideration for the future is to be damned. When you truly think about it, doesn’t all of this sound like we are becoming the machines?
I also do not think that being machine-like is a good thing. Often lost in all of this is the building of personal relationships. Worse yet, instead of being able to do work quickly and more efficiently so you can go home earlier, the opposite is now true for many people. You work harder, longer, do more things, handle more projects and go home later. Scientific studies for the brain suggest that multi-tasking is not healthy and that the brain is not wired for that type of exercise. Perhaps we may evolve as a species but in the meantime have a bottle of aspirin handy. Expectations for the amount of work and results are higher but not compensation. I cannot imagine that that salaries for most workers have trended at the same rapid pace as that of technology. So the question remains, are we using technology or it technology using us? Given that technology may be cool, neat and fun but perhaps not accomplishing its professed purpose, I would suggest that it might be time for you to reign back control from technology instead of becoming such a tool.
