LAWYERS HAVE "Webbed up," like the rest of the
dot com world, with a vengeance. While seeking retail nirvana
(imitating all the rest of the goods and services sellers), law
firms forgot that the Web might serve some other, greater good.
By riding the backs of the e-pigs to the online trough, our
profession has framed the Web as an earning tool and not a
learning tool.
To try a case is to teach a case; and to teach, the teacher
must first learn. No tool in civilized history, no repository of
knowledge known to humankind, even reaches the knees of the
Internet in terms of how much information can be efficiently and
intelligently acquired. It changes the way we think by mirroring
the way we think - Web links that associate relevant knowledge
simulate the brain's synaptic thought and image-making process.
Learning has never been analog, just our ways of teaching. We
have applied analog technologies that produced media, presenting
information with a linear progression since the days of papyrus
all the way to public TV. Now a technology comes to us that
takes us past the assumption that we acquire information best
from left to right, and down the page, page after page after
page.
We find ourselves in a virtuous cycle where the availability
of more information stimulates us to acquire more information,
which stimulates more information to be available and so on. As
this happens, the human mind accelerates in its capabilities to
absorb larger and larger quantities of information.
If you don't believe it, spend a day researching with Web
resources and then try to find comfort in a law library with a
periodical index. It is as if time has slowed to a crawl. It is
physically uncomfortable to acquire information so slowly. Such
learning tools become obsolete when they cannot deliver
information with the quality and quantity the learner demands.
To put it simply, media become obsolete when they employ less
bandwidth than their audience.
Printed books are too slow to meet the demands of a
soon-to-be society that will yield information in terabytes in
nanoseconds over parsecs. This is not to say that reading or
writing in book form will not continue to be satisfying, only
that the acquisition of professional information will need to
occur in other more accelerated media.
Those who want to know enough facts to keep up with the
future will not use books. The digital world will be too
dynamic, too reactive for the traditional publications media,
always undergoing changes occurring too fast to be frozen in
published texts. I foresee a future in which we will all have to
absorb knowledge so quickly that compared to the simple print
media we employ today, it will seem as if we are reading off the
wings of birds in flight.
Why should we settle for anything less than all the law in
the Web hyperlinked to the last case and commentary? No body of
knowledge is more perfectly suited to the Web based method of
juxtaposing information than case law, with its limitless
self-referencing in precedent. Those of us who have begun to
produce Web-based curriculum can plainly see that the pace and
depth of legal education multiplies exponentially when the law
and legal commentary are integrated into a Web page medium.
It has long been accepted that people can only learn so much,
so fast. What the digital renaissance is establishing is that
the only limits on how much we can know are the limits of the
tools we use to learn.
Litigators who work in specialties tied to science, business
and engineering must maintain an awesome pace of technical
advancement and change. The learning strategies of our
profession must keep pace with change in those fields which
modern litigation concerns. You cannot see the 3-D movie that is
the future through 19th century spectacles.
The legal profession and the courts as well will soon have to
face up to a millennial imperative. Not only must we know more
to be worthy counsel, but we must learn to use new means of
gaining worthwhile knowledge.
Instead of trailing the digital caboose at the sufferance of
those who market and merchandise the law, lawyers need to
innovate with the new electronic media. It is in our
professional best interest to undertake a digital public works
project that will bring all the law there is to the Web and
build a consortium of Web based legal education sites that will
eliminate geography and wealth as factors in the intellectual
advancement of lawyers, the public and all students of the law.
We can only be as intelligent a profession as we teach
ourselves to be. Our ways of teaching and training have not kept
pace with the responsibility of greater knowledge that our
society and its technology have placed upon us. We are poor
counsel indeed when we practice law with a poverty of initiative
and innovation in the face of rampant change and opportunity.
Never before has so mighty an engine for the acquisition of
knowledge stood idle at the doorstep of any society. The world
does not need another hundred Web sites selling watches. What
the world needs is for the learned professions to stop being the
puppets of commerce and start being the prophets of an
egalitarian age of accessible knowledge and public information.
We should commit ourselves to this goal not only because it is
good, but also because it is good for us.
