Breaking the Time Treadmill

Excerpts from a presentation given at TechShow '96.

Chicago, IL March 23, 1996

S.A. Guiberson

Now, everyone in the room knows it as a "true thing" that the legal profession is changing. What is it changing into? Finding the time to learn a new program, or learn how to use a laptop, or the new integrated office mail system, is going to be a self-defeating task no matter how much time you are lucky enough to find to spend on it, until you understand that it is the whole system, the whole culture of law practice and providing legal services, and serving your clients well that is in flux. And, if we want to talk about how to make a law firm, or a lawyer, or a legal secretary, or a law clerk understand technology, the first thing they're going to have to understand all over again, is what law practice is about beyond the millennium.

We are retrograde mentalities. We do think in terms of the past as precedent for the future. It's unfortunate that we live in a time when that has absolutely no bearing on what is going to happen. And we have got to appreciate, real quickly, that there are, it's not one big future to which we're all going to be a part, if we can just learn how to work a laptop. There are many futures. There will be fifty different futures, different fractions of futurism in which many of us differ. We live in a world where there are people who own eighteen million dollar jet planes, and people who carry sticks and stab frogs. This is the world we live in. This is the world we will continue to live in.

You've got to understand, that until you appreciate the transformation of a society based on electronic communications and technology -- a world enveloped in a quivering membrane of instantly accessible information, humming around your head the rest of your life, growing exponentially by the day you can appreciate that the only constant in our lives is constant change. And the fundamental skill for relating in the modern world is not, that I know this technology, that I know this product--it is that I have mastered the process of change, that I have a working plan for me to move fluently, through generation after generation of transient technology. The technology, as it is born, begins to disappear. All technology is in a state of vanishing. You have to focus on the constant, which is change.

And to that end, we can't think in terms of how our law practices have been as they always were before. I'm sorry. They never will be the same. Those of us who want to practice law in the world in which lawyers practiced in the 1950's will, by the turn of the century, be looking under rocks in aboriginal jungles of New Zealand for clients. If you want to live that life, you're welcome to it...I don't.

Technology, as we understand it, has become the lightning rod for the transformation of humanity. There's a process I want to be part of. And if I'm going to be part of it, I have to find a means by which I can participate in this medium, I can speak this language. It's like learning. We talk in our office about fluency, we don't talk about "what programs do you know"? Are you fluent? How many applications are you fluent in? It is a language skill, it is learned like a language--not by reserving an hour a day--I know that's the reality in many organizations--but by total immersion. Is it stressful? Hell, yes, it's stressful. It's impossible. Try going to a foreign country where you don't speak the language. That's the only "drop them in the tub--in the pool--and see if they swim," context in which you can really learn technology. For those who are reluctant, do something else for a living. You know, if you want to have those lawyers that talk, in the institution that invests the time in trying to bring the recalcitrant partner along in hopes that they will get the message and start using the technology, this is a waste of time. Those boys need to go out to pasture. This is silly. This is a waste of energy. It costs money. Somebody has to tie up their lives trying to teach this old die-hard something that he'll never understand. Good-Bye! Drop Dead. You know, it is just the reality of life.

And we in the law have some sort of obsession with institutionalization. We feel our legal organizations are "institutions that have to be respected because they have existed for forty years." This is an archaic concept for which our clients have no use. They don't care whether you've been practicing law in their zip code for the last two hundred years. If the mail-boy knows more about e-mail than the senior partner in your firm, you're history. And they don't care whether the law firm they hire lives in their zip code, their area code, or in their time zone. They can do the work over the wire, under the wire, through the wire, or through the Internet. They could care less whether you are there to play golf with them on Tuesday afternoons--no longer a part of the paradigm.

The paradigm has not altogether changed for the worse, though. Now, it is true, there will be a period of much wringing of hands and crying over having to work long hours. This is the reality. No one, a thousand years ago, ever said, no aborigine walking through the Amazonian jungle, yesterday, or a thousand years ago, ever thought as they walked through looking for that frog to stick, that they had to quit looking for that frog at five o'clock. Survival was a twenty-four hour a day process. Folks, survival in the twenty-first century is a twenty-four hour a day process. What your line of work happens to be, is that now you are hunter/gatherers just like that aborigine walking through a jungle of information, seeking out seeds of knowledge. That's what you do for a living.

That's what our future, what that one future, is about. Because that's the service we can render. That's what people of good mind, and diligence, and discipline, and judgment will be doing in the twenty-first century if they want to advise people, if they want to counsel corporate entities and individuals. That's what the relationship between the sage attorney and his willing client will become. And accepting the model of the hunter/gatherer we have to stop making these artificial nineteenth century factory, kind of unionized factory, distinctions between what are work hours and what are not.

And that's altogether not bad news. Because, out of the same process that will defeat the notion of work day and relaxation day, will come a bounty of information and sustenance and, really, a familial relationship both with those you love and those with whom you work. Because the technology, just as it transforms the way we practice, and the way we think about what we do, and the way other people think about what we do, it opens us. It transforms our human potential to broader and broader bandwidths of knowledge and experience. Can you believe it, that our children are walking through the Louvre? I have a little boy who gets on his computer, and walks through the Louvre. He goes to the Russian art museum. He sees the art. He's exposed to Antarctica. He has a vision of this planet and the information and its resources and its bountiful knowledge and beauty that so far surpasses mine of that time period, that it is inconceivable to me that we even live on the same planet.

Yes, he will not punch out at five o'clock, but when five o'clock turns, he will punch in to a broader world than any of us ever imagined living in. He will be part of the whole planet, as the whole planet will be a part of him. That's the bargain we have made with the future, to transform our relationship to all humanity, and as well as, to our own humanity. That's the thing from which we can draw strength as the concept of working day and leisure day passes into oblivion. We are all going to be more a part of everything. Just as we simultaneously become less a part of everything we have known. And, by that I mean, things are in our time both coming together, and falling apart at the same time.

That's what's unique about our time. There have been lots of times in history when things just fell apart. And there have been more good times in human history when things all came together. This is the first time when both things have happened at the same time. And if you can solve that problem of how that is happening, then you will succeed in this future and you will master the integration of time and technology and practice.

The problem becomes creativity and the survivors will become the creators. And, what is the media through which that creativity will be realized? That media is technology. Not because technology is intrinsically or inherently empowering, but because it is the vehicle available to us in our time, to express our creativity as lawyers and thereby, individualize ourselves as lawyers, and, thereby, have a profile to our clients that enables them to seek us out and see the differences about our way of practice, our vision of practicing that separates us from the other lawyers. This isn't all Zen. It's a very practical level of making a marketplace for a lawyer who has a particular profile, a particular individuality which draws a client base to that lawyer. And that technology, only technology, can express that differentiation--that lawyer being different. Because your clients have now become part of a global set, not a, all the people who need work within my zip code. You see? You've become part of a much larger marketplace for lawyers.

That only the binding culture of a legal organization--of any successful organization in the twenty-first century--is going to be envisioning its own change process. The organization that cannot conceive and execute its change processes won't last. Won't be there. Won't be anybody having a day job. That's what's important. That's why this isn't something in which we can obsess over the details of how we spend time learning these things. These things now, these technological things now, are not baubles anymore, they're not trinkets that we can opt to wear or not to wear, they have become integral parts of who we are and what we do.

We have a stereotypical vision of what technology is, that is somehow inhumane, because it is obviously not carbon-based, it's silicon-based, it's a thing apart from us, it's a machine. But in fact, it is a machine which works as a limb of the mind. It is not like other machines that enslave us. It is not the industrial age. It is not a set of tools which drive us into an oblivion of hammering through repetitive acts until we go home. It is something so far beyond that, and perhaps the greatest transformation in human potential since the bronze age. And we're, you know, swimming through it as if were just an ordinary cup of water. It is not. It is a moment in human history unlike anything we might experience again for another millennium.

No one who can, who is literate enough to read, and computer literate enough to log on, need be without the knowledge of the world's greatest wise people. And, to that extent, it opens doors for all humankind that are simply beyond our imagining. And it does make us more human, in that we can now spend more time and more energy humanizing relationships that used to deal with product, and physical transformation of material, and now can deal more and more with human exchange. We will be able to work into a more intuitive, more creative way of being because of the technology, not in spite of it.

Finally, in the course of history, ideas count more than money. Access to the world is open to all. It need not be funneled through establishments, which organize industry and economics for their own gain. There is an equal playing field for all people. Thank you.