Lawyers’ resistance to technology is legendary. Lawyers were reluctant to use
phones to communicate with their clients when the phone was invented. It is a good
bet that if you carefully check a storage closet in a law firm that has been around for
a while you will find carbon paper, a Rolodex with phone numbers of many
deceased people, and an ancient, yellowed pad used to make handwritten diary
entries to bill the client. In a lawyer’s house, the VCR is always flashing “12:00.”
This book is an attempt to do something about that by communicating to lawyers
the urgency of their understanding the technology around them and using it in their
practice in a knowledgeable and efficient manner to serve their clients’ interest. If
we could ban one sentence in the English language, it would be: “you really do not
have to understand the technology to get this.” You most certainly do. Absolving
lawyers from understanding the technology pertaining to the creation, maintenance,
and storage of their clients’ information is as dumb as telling medical interns that
they do not have to understand “that X-ray stuff.”