Last week, several lawyers from the Office of the Judge-Advocate General converged to Ottawa, at the Government of Canada Conference Center, for a National Retreat on integrated information management. The 3-day retreat opened with a one-hour session on Modern Law Practice led by Dominic Jaar, corporate counsel at Bell Canada. Dominic accepted an earlier invitation posted on slaw.
Dominic treated us with something far better than a vision of a future, modern and paperless lawyer: he simply shared with us how he currently worked and demonstrated his day-to-day practice, including court room practice. From accessing remotely the corporate Practice and Case Management System to sifting, filtering and sorting through thousands and millions of documents in the context of e-discovery in a court room setting; Dominic's demonstration was getting the point across very convincingly: it is well worth the upfront investment to become a true paperless lawyer. Whereas he could manage about 30 to 40 cases concurrently, Dominic estimated he could now manage about 110 to 120 cases, with more ease and pleasure.
He also demonstrated several technologies that are part of his Law 2.0 arsenal:
- VPN conduit to the office, enabling him to remotely connect to corporate resources;
- In addition to a Practice and Case Management System, a distinct application to manage, sort, filter, annotate and generally better manage and present evidence in electronic format;
- Whenever authorized by the Judge, automatic voice recognition and transcription of testimonies in his laptop: as witnesses (or anyone for that matter) is speaking in the court room, testimonies and verbal exchanges are automatically transcribed into text;
- Phone service from the computer also, enabling automatic logging of calls into the relevant cases, etc.
If you need a lawyer as speaker for a seminar or conference that is gifted and that has truly gone the paperless route and is also web 2.0 enabled; consider Dominic. He is a member of Sedona Canada (Working Group 7 of Sedona) and regularly writes in the newsletter for l'Association du Jeune Barreau de Montréal. Participants to my Retreat last week were unanimous: his presentation was an eye opener into the future and was very stimulating. We all want him back next year. Now all that you need Dominic, so people can find you easily (especially if they google you); is your very own claimid page. ;-)
[cross posted on Information Management Now]
It was an honor to take part to that well organized conference and to have the chance of meeting a fine group of lawyers from the Office of the Judge-Advocate General. The organizer, Major Patrick Cormier, did a terrific job at getting the office of the JAG up to speed on Web 2.0 initiatives and technology supported legal practice.
While preparing my presentation, I Googled keywords relating to the topic I had to discuss about and stumbled on the incredible amount of information posted out there by no one else than… Patrick Cormier himself. Not only is his blog full of added value information but he also built an incredible website that I decided to use for the second part of the presentation regarding Web 2.0 trends and tools, i.e. Blogs (Blawgs), RSS, Wikis and the likes.
And, Patrick, I am starting my ClaimID today…
You pushed me too much: I had to jump in! Here are my newborns: my blog and my claimID!
That's great – glad to have nudged you over the blogosphere citizenship edge Dominic – you were damn close anyway ;-) Now you are fully prepared for our collective Googlezon future (see the EPIC 2014 movie).
Cheers
patrick