Practice Management

TaxProf Blog and Future Lawyer, as well as others over time, have blog in support and in opposition to pulling or banning notebook computers from the classroom.  I somehow find the concept of banning notebooks from a law school classroom a medieval, feudal, antiquated, and something from the dark ages of the 80s and 90s.  Let us say it is so last century.  In this day and age it might even be comparable to book burning.

The issue is not about multitasking, as some like to pretend.  It is about antediluvian ideas of law professors who have a theomorphic image of themselves.  (By the way, did you hear that God is having delusions of grandeur?  Yeah, he thinks he is a law professor.).

I went to law school in the obsolete past - it seems that it is almost protohistory.  Yet, if I really wanted to ignore the professor (and there were a few I wanted to ignore), I would just stick a magazine in my book, or read a different book, or write on my pad thoughts of things different from the subject matter at hand.  I would pay partial attend least I be called on.  You could call it multitasking.  I called it avoiding fruitless  orating for which I (or in my case, my parents) were being forced to pay dearly.

We need to face the fact that there are a lot of very smart people teaching at law schools.  We need to also face the fact that there are still a good many of these very smart people who cannot inspirit themselves out of a paper bag.

In my day and age, this was wasted time.  But, in this Third Wave period of high tech and a world spiraling head on toward universality, we do not need professors and law schools that want to inhibit the universal character or the range of knowledge of our future lawyers, judges, business people, bureaucrats, and politicians.

My daughter experienced this in her first semester of law school.  One law professor (an older law professor) banned all notebook computers in his classroom.  He wanted the law school to take the Wi-Fi responder down from the area that reaches his classroom (luckily without success).  Sure, he succeeded in stopping the text messaging of all of the infantile remarks about his teaching style, but what he punished were the students (as I hope is my daughter) that use the computer to follow their briefing, take notes and enhance their outlines.  You know, the things that really matter in a law school environment -- preparation for the test.  Every day in which she had his class, she had to print off (on something called "paper") all of this information.  Take notes by hand.  Then afterwards input the data back in her computer.

Most law schools these days require a student to buy a notebook computer.  Except for the first semester, most legal research is done on the computer.  Increasingly the library and the schools bookstore (with the exception of the branded T-shirts sold) are becoming museum-ishly quaint in nature.  Today as well, most of our federal courthouses are Wi-Fi ready, almost all pleadings are uploaded, downloaded, and served upon opposing counsel by email.  Legal research and drafting is done on the computer in the courtroom.  One bankruptcy judge in Houston (Marvin Isgur) drafts his orders in open court everybody can view and discusses them with counsel as the documents appear on the monitors in the courtroom.

We as people, and especially what is expected as law students, learn by repetition - by doing.   We have the first real generation starting law school that grew up with tech -- who grew up with computers.  They are central to how they operate in this World.  Yet, they are by and large being taught by law professors who are outdated, who are Second Wave in their practices and theories and in their brainwork.  It cannot be helped.  It is generational. The fact of the matter is that the World is changing and it is changing at a speed unheard of in the past.  Law schools and law professors must strive against their archaic instincts to be more amenable and adaptable and to acclimate to this World and not  hamper, hinder, wall off or traverse the skill set  needed for real lawyers of the future to thrive and succeed.  Law schools have to guard against the troglodytes among their clan from destructing, disadvantaging, sabotaging or wounding the futures of the lawyers who must operate in the World they want to avoid.

The issue is not should notebook computers be allowed in the law school classroom?  The question should be why notebook computers are not in some professor's classrooms?  Why are they not mandated to be there?  No matter how urbane, how erudite, how fascinating, or charismatic a professor might be, if that law professor is trying to barricade his classroom, his students, the law, or himself from the real world of tech, then he or she is Amish -- and needs to go.  To the degree that a law schools thinks that is a hard choice to make, it is not.  The future always wins.  Those that want to pretend the Earth is flat lose.