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Lonely Divorce and Family Lawyers – Coronavirus Kills the Courts No. 5

Lonely Divorce and Family Lawyers – Coronavirus Kills the Courts No. 5

 CourtHouse Community

 

“Solos and small firms (2-9 attorneys) comprise the majority of the legal profession. This year, 63% of respondents of the 2019 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report” 2019 Solo & Small Firm

 

Lonely Divorce and Family Lawyers

In theory, society would like to see lonely divorce and family lawyers. My enthusiasm for technology saving the Court system is not without bounds. Months into the lockdown, candidly, I miss my friends and colleagues in the Courthouse. The lawyers, the judges, and Court staff are a community. Although we strongly advocate against one another, lawyers are my people. Divorce and family lawyers litigate many cases against the same divorce and family lawyer advocates. The sheriff’s officers who make me take off my belt are there for my protection. Blocking everyone out of the Courthouse has magnified that loneliness and compounded virus anxiety. 

There is a sense of loneliness among practitioners in general.

I learned how to act like a lawyer by watching the good lawyers. The result of watching good lawyers was also watching a lot of bad lawyers. Watching the bad lawyer wires the young lawyer to look out and appreciate the good lawyers. I quickly saw who I did not want to emulate. I watched judges interact with a range of lawyer presentations. Forceful and thoughtful presentations are accepted. Crazed emotional presentations never prevail. Highly-technical and voluminous presentations tend to produce inconsistent results.

Divorce and Family Lawyer Referrals

I met most of my referral sources in and around the Courthouse. Either a lawyer directly refers me to a case or a lawyer knows somebody who knows somebody and vouches for me. That’s how the best attorney-client interactions begin, with an introduction from a lawyer.

 

In the name of maintaining business relationships and more importantly human connections lawyers and Court professionals will be well advised to follow the tips offered by highly regarded coach to successful lawyers, Elise Holtzman, Esquire of the Lawyers Edge A Note from Elise Holtzman  in a recent blog post excerpted here :

What clients and prospects DO want

is to develop friendly professional relationships and learn new things that may be helpful to them or someone they care about, particularly during a time of heightened uncertainty. They want someone to listen to and care about them. Someone who can help solve their problems, assuage their fears, share the burden, and prepare for the future.

Reach out to friends, clients, colleagues, and contacts for the sole purpose of checking in, listening to their stories, and wishing them well. Take your eyes off the business development “prize” for the moment and just connect. Reaching out to others with caring and authenticity is appropriate no matter the circumstances and will deepen and strengthen your relationships.

 

Meet New People.

Although it may sound strange to consider meeting new people while living through a pandemic, it’s easier than you might expect to expand your network while working from home. While sending out cold emails or uninvited LinkedIn messages touting your law practice won’t endear you to anyone, asking someone to connect because you have common interests or you want to learn more about them often results in a positive response. For example, I recently attended a webinar during which it became clear that one of the panelists and I have a great deal in common and serve a similar clientele in different but related ways. I sent him a friendly LinkedIn message letting him know about our common interests and asking him to connect. He responded favorably and we have a video chat scheduled in the next few days.

 

Anticipate Your Clients’ Current and Future Needs.

Right now, it’s anything but business as usual. Your clients and contacts are being faced with demands, challenges, and even opportunities they may never have anticipated. As they focus on jumping into action to respond to those changes, they run the risk of suffering the negative consequences of misunderstanding, overlooking, or failing to recognize key business and legal issues that may impact them.

https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2020/04/24/six-business-development-tips-for-lawyers-during-covid-19/?slreturn=20200723204042

Five Resources to Optimize

“The goal is to hit the sweet spot of maximum value optimization, where foolish risk is balanced against excessive caution.”

Steven J. Bowen, Total Value Optimization: Transforming Your Global Supply Chain Into a Competitive Weapon

 

Time

Courts need to optimize for time. Earlier in this blog I decried the Court’s reflexive emphasis on case movement by measuring only the time it takes a case from filing to resolution. Time is easy to measure. A case comes in on a certain day and as long as it goes out of the system within some predetermined range it is a success. Cases taking years to move through the system undermine the confidence of the Court customer. Here I’m talking about case movement, and intra-case activity. How much time does it really take for a case to get through the system? How much of the case should be bogged down in Court oriented activities?

Parkinson’s Law

Cases get resolved when judges, Court staff and lawyers have time pressure to get cases done. Parkinson’s universal law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In that light, it makes sense to put in time restrictions.

Discovery is the cursed component of moving cases. Delayed discovery causes szalay’s in case movement acrimony between the parties and time-wasting motion practice in the Court. Smart Courts do not have discovery disputes. Smart Courts do not waste judges time with discovery

 

Optimizing Court time means

utilizing an electronic checklist where lawyers and Court customers need to report back into the Court as each task is accomplished. The legacy system now directs lawyers and Court customers –  to meet a bunch of deadlines.  Go forth and perform discovery between now and the deadline.  then when one party or more likely both parties fail to perform, start fighting, send letters back and forth and file motions. A huge waste of time that generally accomplishes nothing substantively.

Discovery

In the reborn Court system, artificial intelligence – not a new employee of the bureaucracy, breaks down the tasks associated with discovery into many milestones. With each milestone there is an electronic check in. The lawyers or Court customers self-represented will report that for example – interrogatories were served on a certain date. The interrogatories will be served electronically to eliminate gamesmanship. The Due dates are logged by the artificial intelligence system. On the due date the lawyers or self-represented Court customers must “click” that the task was complete or not complete.

A reasonable extension request

can be made and granted by the artificial intelligence computer.  If the activity has not been completed then a follow-up is triggered. If the follow-up fails to produce results, then the noncompliant lawyer or Court customer is pulled in for a videoconference to explain why to Court staff and assessed a small sanction. Extra humans are required for none of these steps. Indeed, getting Discovery out of the judges responsibilities and primarily in the realm of electronic saved an enormous amount of Court resources and dramatically reduced headcount.

All of this is a part of managing the case inside or managing a case from the inside. Enough dings in the case gets dismissed. The games and case dismissals are tallied up. If a lawyer is a frequent flyer who never completes discovery on time, this distinction becomes public knowledge. If a lawyer is the practitioner who gets cases dismissed the most this becomes part of his or her disciplinary file and becomes public information. Who wants to hire the lawyer that can never move cases along? 

Lawyers Waste Time

I admit it. Lawyers waste a lot of Court time. Lawyers waste Court time by not meeting deadlines and thereby creating busy work, often billable to the client. The unseen cost to the system is extra work by Court staff. Lawyers waste a tremendous amount of Court time by being late. Some lawyers are late for everything. Some lawyers are double booked in multiple Courtrooms or houses and get stuck in one leaving everyone else to wait at the other. The hourly business model incentivizes delay. AI Technology and reasonable calendar planning can alleviate a substantial majority of these time-wasting events and shine a bright light on those that will abuse any system erected to facilitate efficiency and optimization. I may be a lonely divorce and family lawyer, but I am a time and efficiency advocate.

 

If there are good reasons why certain documents cannot be produced, discovery exchanged or reports generated then a good faith reason is offered. If the reason is facially sufficient to the AI then an extension is granted. Again this requires no additional human time inside the Court building. If the task is not completed and the reasoning is not facially understandable or justifiable then the lawyer or Court customer deals with a judge. This eliminates about 80% of motion practice for failure to respond to discovery, produce reports and exchange information. Coronavirus kills intra-case time wasting.

Workflow

Systemic time wasting involves bringing people together in bulk and is totally avoidable. Simple, electronic calendaring, electronic workflow and videoconferencing for Cort events that do not have constitutional significance, keep people from having to rush from Court to Court and wait and wait and wait.

Technology

 

“increasing automation accompanied by social ruin. We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market.”

Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

Review – The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future; by Max Nova

 

The robots are here. Let them help. Fearing the robot puts you back in the mindset of the horse shoe maker cursing cars. Cursing automation is an ephemeral state. Indeed, this entire blog is being typed by a robot. I dictate to Google and  the robot translates my sounds into words. Type with your voice – Docs Editors Help .Then I edit by voice editing. Time was, this technology was a secretary taking shorthand and then typing into a typewriter. Is anyone gnashing their teeth  or weeping that I am not followed around by a secretary who must be available to me day and night? Not at all. Artificial intelligence, the robots will speed up cases, will make good cases better and get rid of bad cases faster. AI will help judges make better decisions. AI will make lawyers and Court customers make better decisions.

Decision Making

After all, Court customers are in Court because of bad decisions or decisions that cannot be agreed upon by the parties to a lawsuit. Not good, not bad but different. No lawyer or professor has studied and reported on trial lawyer and law firm decision-making with the zeal and long-term commitment of Randall Kiser of DecisionSet Litigation Decision Analysis :: Randall Kiser :: Law Firm Decisions based in Palo Alto, CA. Kiser is the author of four books.

His most recent book, American Law Firms in Transition: Trends, Threats and Strategies, was released by the American Bar Association in April 2019. Two years earlier, Cambridge University Press published his groundbreaking book, Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer. His previous books, Beyond Right and Wrong: The Power of Effective Decision Making For Attorneys and Clients and How Leading Lawyers Think: Expert Insights Into Judgment and Advocacy are cited by practitioners and scholars in North America, Europe and Asia. 

Randall’s most recent book, American Law Firms in Transition: Trends, Threats and Strategies, shares his analysis about the some catastrophic failures of huge Law Firms  and challenges  faced going forward. His criticisms are unsentimental and sharp. “Law firms’ problems are rooted deeply in attorney personality characteristics; law firms’ recruitment processes,  professional development programs,  and partnership admission criteria; practice group and law firm leader selection; and attorneys short-term perspectives … hindered by the impractical nature of legal education…” Much of the poignant criticisms leveled at law firm leadership and management apply to the Courts. When it comes to legacy inefficiencies and limited mindsets,  the Courts are the cousins of law firms.

In How Leading Lawyers Think: Expert Insights Into Judgment and Advocacy, Kiser summarizes the characteristics of leading trial lawyers: “responsibility, respect, resourcefulness and resiliency.”  Furthermore, “rather than relying on old routines and schemas, they remain critical of their own performance and continually evaluate and attempt to improve their analysis, presentation and judgment.” The unmistakable theme Is the willingness, the eagerness of the most experienced lawyer practitioners to continuously improve. These lawyers are open to criticism and solicit outside input. If the top practitioners approach their trial work with the mindset of a learner,  as coronavirus kills the Courts, top practitioners will contribute mightily to its rebirth. 

 

Educated Court Customer

“An educated consumer is our best customer.” Marcy Syms, Syms Clothing 

The coronavirus has pushed the Court’s beyond the previous comfort zone in putting out educational materials. Courts have joined the YouTube revolution and added videos to online forms. Everything can be turned into an online class. How to file, how to show up at Court electronically or in person. You do the video once and you train thousands of Court customers.

When the Court customer has a question about the process, you avoid them getting inconsistent information when you refer them to a comprehensive video and set of forms. If they make a mistake you correct the mistake in a substantive way with reference to a video or reference to other documentary resources. Courts open access to justice by adding top notch educational information to their online resources and make the goal of educating the Court customer rather than repelling the Court customer a top priority.

Court Customer Advice

Time will be magically freed up as it becomes a priority for the Court system and its stakeholders. Free time can be used for good or bad. Harkening back to Parkinson’s law; the bureaucracy can certainly chew up time and create busywork. Lawyer free time can be used for mayhem as well.  Perhaps lonely divorce and family lawyers will donate time and talent to improve the Court process.Here I suggest that Court staff and lawyers unburdened with time wasting Court appearances and hustling from building to building in Court to Court can use their skills for good. Giving advice to mediate Court customer emotions.

As a result, a Court customer with just a little more advice before more likely to file the right form at the right time at the right place. The Court customer with a little advice will before more likely be a good citizen and control their emotions. Conversely, helping the Court customer set the right expectations with some free or low-cost advice and the entire system runs better.

Chatbot Education

Chatbots interact with consumers engaging with a problem or buying decision. The New Jersey Courts have enabled a chatbot accessible through Amazon’s Alexa.  Here is the NJ JIA Description on the Amazon Alexa Skills page:

Jia the Judiciary Information Agent is a chatbot for answering user questions and providing information on the New Jersey Judiciary Court System. Jia can provide users with information regarding: Jury Service, Attorney Registration, Foreclosure, NJ eCourts, Definitions of Court procedures and terms, Requesting Records, and Court contact info.

With this skill users can have Alexa ask Jia their NJ Courts related questions and receive the same information that they would get by using the chatbot on NJCourts.gov; with the added convenience of a voice assistant.

 

Court Customer Service

 

When the Court is a miserable experience, justice is badly served. When the Court customer feels unwelcome and is in the constant state of bewilderment, results get lost in the wave of emotion and confusion. Of course, it happens to lawyers too. I console many of my colleagues when they receive a ruling that is way out of bounds. There is not enough money in the case or meat on the bone to take an appeal but bad results push people to bad actions.

 

I call my clients around the Court appearance to gauge their state of mind and get any updates. I usually asked if they got any sleep last night? Even the foolish optimists feel the weight of the Court event. Customer service means treating the Court customers time as valuable. Customer service means recognizing that Court customers are paying lawyers and experts by the hour.  Wasted time not only erodes mental energy but depletes the financial resources needed to get the case resolved.

Frequent Flyers NOT Needed

Unlike other businesses who want customer service to translate to more business, the Court system does not want frequent flyers. The Court system customer service model is to get the customers in, get them out and hopefully get them to forget about their Court experience and give them no reason to want to come back.

Smart Courts

“Many companies, including Google, Tesla, SpaceX and New York City public schools, have banned their employees from using Zoom until its security is improved,..”

Lauren Berg, Law 360

Zoom User Claims ‘Uninvited Men’ Let Into Pole-Dancing Class

 

In the middle of Coronavirus mania Courts resorted to numerous off-the-shelf technology solutions. The Court system was not equipped to handle this disruption on the fly. Battlefield created solutions feel heroic at times. Battlefield created solutions also inform well-designed secure solutions. Among the other technologies the Court is utilizing our Microsoft Teams, conference now and Zoom calls. All our amazing feats of technology.

They are fast, easy and cheap

They are ubiquitous and the vast majority of stakeholders can utilize these tools with little to no rollout and little to no training. If you can operate a phone you can call in. If you have the most basic of video capable smartphone, tablet or computer you can participate in a Zoom video conference or Microsoft Teams video conference. Fundamentally, these are dial in technologies. Anyone with the dial-in number and passcode can participate and for that matter can hack calls.

Numerous anecdotal stories have landed where by an lawyer is communicating with clients or colleagues and one of these off-the-shelf of video conferencing products is hacked and the guests are treated to a free pornography show. These off-the-shelf solutions are not sufficient for Court use.  Lawyers and clients must know that their communications will be secure, secret and confidential. Court proceedings mirrored by hackers, audio interference inserting an improper video input or recording of a confidential proceeding. While Zoom and Microsoft Teams have enjoyed great popularity, they must be viewed in light of Best Practices yet to be established for Courts.

 

Court Recording

While Courts enjoy terrific recording abilities and are in some ways very well-equipped to adopt video conferencing technology, the security must be best available and universally applied. Fortunately, the solutions to this dilemma already exist in the form of the virtual meeting room. Ron Gaboury is the CEO of Yorktel, Leadership  the leader in secure video conferencing for Fortune 500 companies and the federal government. His company has rolled out technological solutions for decades that enable global corporations to conduct their business in complete privacy and security through video conferencing.

YorkTel deploys VMR Webcasting Services For Virtual Events | Virtual Meeting Rooms . The virtual meeting room unlike a dial-in system features a specific invite that emerges from the VMR to the invited participants. The VMR controls the access. The VMR issues the invite or the welcome mat to those participants once and once only. That opening is never utilized again. Zoom bombs do not plague the world’s top corporations. Ron shares his thinking on the key traits of effective Court videoconferencing and workflow integration:

 

It has been said the wheels of justice move slowly, but in these transformative times that’s no longer the case. Things are moving quickly as we react to the new realities of public health concerns and the necessity of social distancing. Judges, Court administrators and IT professionals were newer to using remote appearances and trying technology such as Zoom Skype or WebEx to address their needs to keep the Courts open and functioning.

Emergency Tools

These tools on an ad hoc or an emergency basis have shown the advantages of remote appearances, but these mass market platforms have also shown that managing these tools can be disruptive and distracting that how you manage your Courts. Some require Courts to handle all scheduling training and coordination, some are not as soon as you would like and others that features you don’t need some require downloads on your device that you may not want, and still others do not have the core features you require on a daily basis. In short, they don’t fit into your workflow and you’re not what I call invisible.

The technology is taking over. 

 I’ve seen thousands of deployments, and I know what works and what does not work. As Courts work through the current challenges and beyond the ideal platform replicates the Courtroom environment with a virtual gallery easy to engage lawyer sidebars, conferences, and private attorney sessions. Judges remain in control. Technology protocols that  work with your calendar and integrate with DocuSign, allowing for real time, electronic execution of orders, and important documents, the ideal platform enables you to handle remote appearances as seamlessly as you’ve been running your Court on a daily basis.

Proven security

It works in the Courtroom as well as complex situations where all the judges, Court staff, attorneys, planners, Court customers and other parties are fully remote, the platform works with all types of Courts and for all types of proceedings and arraignments remote traffic, civil, family, probate, mental health, bankruptcy, juvenile hearings or any type of assignment recording and listening and broadcast for the press or general public, are also available. Proven security, convenience and reliability are the lodestar. Truly administered solutions from both the Court-side and the technology vendor side are the only options for the complex and often conflicting due process aspirations and public access requirements.

 

Best Available

Why should divorce and family lawyers settle?

The world’s largest corporations utilize more secure and administered solutions. Likewise, the federal government and healthcare industry utilize the virtual meeting room solution available through vendors. The virtual meeting room includes a layer of security and visibility to responsible administrators on the vendor side and the user side. On the vendor side a Root Administrator is appointed and has full permissions to manage the host client side of the videoconference as well as the customer side. Security and functionality are both significantly optimized.

For the Court system a Channel Administrator is appointed who can assign and manage the technology from the host client side.

Coronavirus kills the Courts and the reborn Court system is a blend of the stalwart and the cutting edge. The stable branch of government, meets the cutting edge of video conferencing and workflow integration. Lonely divorce and family lawyers still miss the live CourtHouse experiences. But, clients save time and money when technology force efficiency on the Courts and lonely divorce and family lawyers.

https://hornlawgroup.net/meet-jeff-horn/

Fast Facts About Family Law to Get You Thinking About Your Preparation – https://hornlawgroup.net/blog/fast-facts-about-family-law-to-get-you-thinking-about-your-preparation/

Featured Image Photographer:Dmitry Nikulnikov; Models:Dasha usova