Peggy and I are in New Orleans this week for the Clio Cloud Conference (ClioCon, for short), in the hope of picking up some knowledge about the massive changes underway in the legal tech industry.  To be sure, mine is a very odd practice, and would not exist but for the wide range of technological marvels that we couldn’t even dream of just a few years ago.  It’s an exciting time to be a lawyer, frankly.

Yeah, it’s a bear for new graduates to find jobs in the traditional sector– I’m only five years out myself, and the white shoe firms in Kansas City didn’t even give me a first look, much less a second– but the traditional way of doing things is going away.  It’s a slow process, and a painful one, but this industry is undergoing a metamorphosis.  The caterpillar isn’t dying.  It’s merely in a chrysalis, and the butterfly is soon to emerge.  Like any industry, ours is being disrupted by technology, and that has the buggy-whip manufacturers justifiably terrified.  But for every buggy-whip maker who lost his job at the beginning of the last century, several autoworkers built careers.  I see the same thing happening in the law.  And I’m at ClioCon this week specifically to get a better handle on how that will come about.

In my own field– cross-border civil procedure– I predict a couple of things:

• Central Authorities will, in the next five years, begin to accept electronic submissions of Hague Service requests.  Now, on its face, this seems like not much of a stretch.  But the rest of the world has yet to embrace technological enhancements to legal procedure.  Heck, there are still state courts in the U.S. that require all pleadings on paper.  Eventually, though, I envision Hague authorities allowing submission of requests at the click of a mouse.
• Service of process by electronic means will become more and more acceptable to U.S. courts in the coming few years.  This is only logical– federal courts (with the exception of immigration courts, if you can believe it) are completely equipped for e-filing.  And that ridiculous and arcane legal fiction called publication becomes harder to justify every day.  The Mullane standard is simple enough that it makes service by email (or Facebook or LinkedIn or… insert a medium here) a practical necessity, rather than a novelty.  Before too long, some countries around the world will begin to accept it as a part of Hague Service Convention methodology.

Sooner or later, all-things-Hague will be able– at least in some countries– to be accomplished with the click of a mouse.  No muss, no fuss. I look forward to being a part of that development, and I hope to glean enough understanding of current trends at ClioCon to take full advantage of new stuff in the legal tech industry.

Stay tuned for more.

They tell me that if I tag #ClioCloud9 in my posts, the guys at LexBlog will buy me a beer.  I don’t know if that’s true, but my favorite local brew is Big Easy IPA.