E-File….or Die?
Last week, I attended a CLE luncheon where the local county elected clerks were presenting on the upcoming roll out of eCourts to the judicial district. I was running late to the luncheon so when I arrived, I was preoccupied with going by the banquet table to pick up the included boxed lunch and finding a place to sit. After I had found a seat and was about to open the boxed lunch and start listening to the presentation, I was able to take a quick look around the room. Almost every lawyer in the room listening to the elected clerks of the court try and allay people’s fears of the impending eCourts roll out was well over the age of 50 years old. I could count on one hand those attorneys in the room that were under the age of 50, me being one of them. The presentation was very informative and educational. But what I realized taking in the average age of the audience as well as listening to how attorneys were now supposed to file their documents with the computer, was that most of the presentation was geared to trying to ease the collective anxieties of the older attorneys. I then started to think, why were the older lawyers in the room so anxious about this change? We attorneys are supposed to be able to adapt to change. So much of our practice changes organically. The law changes constantly. Court rules change. Legal issues change. With the advent of new technologies and social norms, we attorneys need to be flexible and find ways through the new legal issues these types of changes can provoke in order to solve new problems for clients. So why in the heck was the prospect of filing our “papers” via the internet so frightening to attorneys?
This is not a new or revolutionary prospect. A year prior to this CLE, a local judge speaking at a local Bar luncheon started speaking to the impending eCourts change to the legal diaspora. The judge said something that I couldn’t get out of my head. They prophesized that at least one thing was guaranteed to occur with the coming of eCourts: we could expect a lot of attorneys to retire and leave the profession. What?!!? You mean that some attorneys who did NOT want to adapt to e-filing would be so disillusioned with it that they would rather just retire than learn a new way of performing in the profession? It turns out that this is not so unrealistic. When the medical field went from handwritten medical charts to the electronic medical chart platform where doctors would need to type their medical notes into a program, this caused a lot of doctors who did not want to conform to just retire. This just seems a bit extreme to me. But it seems that this is a reality.
It just seems so incompatible with our profession for us to be so unwilling to LEARN something new. The law changes all the time, and we are forced to not only learn it, but implement the new ways in which we must practice due to the change. So, what the hell? Or maybe the resistance for older attorneys has less to do with change itself, but the type of change that eCourts brings.
So much of litigation is about relationships: relationships with the bailiffs, interpreters, judges and clerks. We experience a lot of the joys (and oftentimes the woes) of our practice through our relationships. The litigators’ relationships to the clerks cannot only be necessary but substantial, long standing, and meaningful. I recently attended a birthday party for an attorney who was formally an assistant deputy clerk. The attorney’s managing attorney in their firm was at this party and told me that they had first met the birthday attorney while they were a deputy clerk, decades earlier. They encouraged this attorney to go to law school while they were a deputy clerk, which they ultimately did. This relationship had been formed, in part, because of the requirement for us attorneys to go to the courthouse and file our documents with the clerk in person. eCourts will drastically affect the formation and maintenance of these relationships. Perhaps this is the real reason behind the pushback over eCourts. Older attorneys, perhaps more so than younger attorneys, know and better understand the value of these types of relationships. It will be harder to form these relationships by clicking to serve our filings, as opposed to standing across the partition chatting it up with a deputy clerk while they manually file stamp our filings.
Whatever it is, I think we need to not be so fearful of adapting to changes in the way the profession operates. We were trained to adapt, change and be flexible, just like the law. While changes in the profession can and do affect our relationships, which can be the backbone of any competent litigator’s practice, those relationships can blossom in new and different ways. The bottom line is that eCourts is coming and there are a lot of benefits to not having to race to the courthouse to file our “papers” any longer. While it will be a large change to the way we practice in North Carolina (for the litigator anyway) change is not always so bad or scary. So, let’s be the resilient bunch that we know we can be! Come on eCourts! We are ready for you!
For more information on eCourts and how to file your “papers” electronically in eligible counties visit website: https://www.nccourts.gov/ecourts . Good Luck!