Future Proofing: Gaining Perspectives From the ABA Center for Innovation

Don Bivens: The Center focuses on the intersection of law, technology, social justice and regulation to make legal services better and more accessible to people. The unique position of the ABA allows for multidisciplinary approaches to reshape both the delivery of, and access to, legal services to meet today’s demands of the legal system and consumers. The Center seeks input from, and collaborates with, practicing attorneys, technologists, innovators, designers, consumers, social entrepreneurs and those in public policy to develop new projects, programming and other resources to help drive innovation in the delivery of legal services and the practice of law.

Bivens: We host the Legal Innovation Regulatory Survey, which is a website to provide the profession and the public with state-by-state information of known efforts to reform the regulation of legal service delivery, at legalinnovationregulatorysurvey.info. Anyone can access the site and see what changes are occurring across the country.

Bivens:  We have several projects on different timelines. We are looking down the road maybe four to six years with one project.

We are working nationally with states that are making regulatory changes or considering making changes to determine what metrics we need to measure to know if we are making progress with these reform efforts. It will need to be more than statistics gathered through the courts. We need to know what to measure and how to measure consistently to know if we are adjusting regulations in the right ways, and whether we are truly serving people who don’t currently have access to justice. We hope to encourage a convening of these states to discuss these issues soon.

Bivens: Another current project addresses the recent ethical obligations of technology competence. With the changes in the rules adopted by the majority of states, we are creating educational modules to help lawyers maintain their tech competence in the areas of privacy and confidentiality, addressing ethical concerns as well as global privacy regulation. Readers can visit the Center for Innovation webpage on the ABA website for more information.

Lastly, we hope to encourage another national conference on the future of law practice, bringing together judges, lawyers, academics, regulators and others to collaborate on the changes taking place now and in the future.

Bivens: As a litigator, I’m seeing creative use of videoconferencing involving courts and court hearings. Some live trials are proceeding in larger ceremonial courtrooms where people can be socially distanced and observers can watch by video.

I think videoconferencing is working surprisingly well for initial jury selection. Rather than have a large number of potential jurors in the jury waiting room, they are being interviewed in groups of 8 to 10 by video until we get a more manageable group of actual potential jurors. Jurors, judges and lawyers are reporting success with this new method.

Remote work has caused a demand within firms for better, more standardized document templates that are simpler with fewer variables. That certainly was happening before the pandemic, but I believe has accelerated now.

It seems clients are also quickly acclimating to the new virtual world and don’t seem to mind not coming into the office for certain meetings and events.

With these changes it seems that many law firms are going to need less office space, but it may be too soon to determine that.