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You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract from article by Craig Ball
With every disruptive technology, lawyers go through the Four Stages of Attorney E-Grief: Denial, Anxiety, Rulemaking and Delusion. I considered a stage called “Prattle,” but that hit too close to home.
Lawyers confront disruptive technologies by pretending they don’t exist, like those firms who advised clients to steer clear of cloud computing or the multitudes spending millions of client dollars to contort electronic data into printed, paginated documents. When hiding our heads in the sand fails, we worry. In the Anxiety stage, lawyers pen fretful journal articles about the fast-approaching digital Armageddon, exhorting our brethren to “prepare” without practical advice on what to…you know…do. We trot out a Parade of Horribles underscoring the risk and burden flowing from our rendering advice born of fear and ignorance. “Preserve it all,” we counsel, without the fiduciary disclosure of, “because I don’t know what ‘it’ is or how to figure ‘it’ out.”
Anxiety begets Rulemaking, insuring the law marginalizes new evidence and protects parties and counsel from the consequences of business as usual. New rules buy time. The longer lawyers delay compulsory adaption or blunt the consequences of incompetence, the less we are compelled to change.
Read the complete article at The Internet of Things Meets the Four Stages of Attorney E-Grief