Legal Research

Distracted Lawyering

By Shaunna Mireau

A couple of waves aligned in my universe today:

• I followed a link to “Watching the Digital Detectives: The Arrival of Next-Generation Legal Skills” written for the ABA Law Practice Today by Ernie Svenson of Ernie The Attorney
• The Alberta Government introduced Bill 16 Traffic Safety (Distracted Driving) Amendment Act, 2010

Ernie’s article (I will address him by first name since frequently reading his good stuff makes me feel like we are close friends) mentioned his experience with a class of law students he was presenting information to:

Almost all of them had a laptop in front of them, which was good. I was hooked up to the Internet and demonstrated how to find things using Internet services like Google Reader, Delicious and so forth. As I referred to these services, I sensed that the students were going to those sites and reading along for themselves.

Ernie’s premise is that even though the students appeared distracted, they were actually listening, but not only listening. He was OK with it. Like the Alberta government, I have a hard time reconciling partial attentiveness with enough attentiveness to navigate successfully.

Practicing law requires attentive listening, to law librarians and most especially to clients. Reading case law and legislation means deep reading, not just skimming the paragraph where your keywords appear. Senior counsel sitting in a discovery may be able to check their BlackBerry and still retain the thread of what is happening because of many similar experiences, but is that really an acceptable norm? Haven’t we read enough about how multitasking makes us stupid?

Alberta isn’t the first to legislate distracted driving. Do we need rules on distracted lawyering?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 15, 2010 (boomark / email).