Canadian Lawyer

16 J U N E / J U LY 2 0 1 9 w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m HUAN TRAN T he world is awash with digital devices. Lawyers, typically not partial to new things, have had to face this uncongenial fact. They must use com- puters in their daily work. They are asked to advise clients on complex computer-related issues. All this makes them nervous. They don't always understand how machines work (some never figured out how to send a fax). And awkward issues of an ethical nature can confound and confuse, as vast new areas of highly technical practice open up. Once upon a time, the computer was an exotic thing you read about in a maga- zine — the mysterious Turing Machine devised by enigmatic Englishman Alan Turing in the 1930s or Colossus used by British intelligence to decrypt coded Ger- man messages at the end of the Second World War or the 1946 ENIAC weighing 30 tons and initially used by the U.S. government for calculations needed to create L E G A L E T H I C S THE COMPUTER CONUNDRUM By Philip Slayton New technologies force the profession to deal with new ethical debates the hydrogen bomb. Today, almost everyone has a smartphone in their pocket with computing power far greater than that used by NASA in 1969 to put men on the moon. In 1974, I wrote a report commissioned by the federal Department of Communications assessing the future of what was then quaintly called "electronic legal retriev- al." I was skeptical about computers being used in legal research and concluded the methodol- ogy didn't have much of a future. I was wrong, of course, although, in 1974, many lawyers felt the same way. Around the time I wrote the report, Hugh Lawford, a law professor at Queen's Uni- versity in Kingston, Ont., was in the early stages of developing what became Quicklaw, a pioneer- ing and ultimately successful electronic legal retrieval system. Many, including me, scoffed at Quicklaw. Wrong again! Quicklaw was eventu- ally sold to West Publishing in the United States, and it lives on today as LexisNexis. And well I remember — I think it must have been about 1990 — when the Bay Street law firm for which I worked offered a desktop computer to any part- ner who wanted one. Many showed no interest. "They're just expensive paper weights," one very senior lawyer told me, clutching a yellow legal pad and a couple of pencils as he tottered along to the firm's sumptuous library of leather-bound books to do a bit of legal research. The advent of computers raises two broad sets of problems for lawyers, each with ethical implications. The first involves the nature and structure of legal practice. Machines now easily perform routine legal tasks. For example, a com- puter can quickly scan thousands of documents and decide which ones are relevant to a case or transaction. That kind of chore once required squads of junior lawyers, each billed out at a handsome rate and dreaming of a brilliant legal career. Soon, machines will be capable of truly complex legal tasks — predicting the outcome of proposed litigation, for instance — supplant- ing more human beings and yet more human skills. The result is a revolution within legal ser- vices. Work is being reorganized and redefined. Billable hours are in decline. Fewer and fewer lawyers are needed, particularly middle- and junior-ranked lawyers. Traditional career aspira- tions are being denied. New and scarce skills are needed. People are getting hurt. Faced with this disruption, what are the ethical responsibilities of the profession — the law society, law schools, law firms, senior lawyers — particularly to young lawyers trying to make their way? What is a fair way to reorganize and adjust? The second set of problems comes from the @philipslayton O P I N I O N

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