Page 22 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2020

FEATURE
Richard Forsten
The
Importance of Water Coolers
Some pre-COVID In this age of the internet, 24/7 news cycles and instant punditry, it’s
traditions are essential to the practice of law
tempting to want to make definitive pronouncements about how the current pandemic will forever change the practice of law.
20 DELAWARE LAWYER FALL 2020
Already, many are predicting that law offices of the future will be smaller, or that lawyers may not even have individual offices at all (the so-called “hotel” model, where if you need to come into the office to work, you’ll be assigned an office for that day). With lawyers able to work almost anywhere with a laptop and a decent Wifi connection, why waste money on offices for every lawyer? And, why waste time (and money) on daily com- mutes to and from the office?
We are, we are told, on the verge of a golden age, and a lifestyle revolution. The lawyer of tomorrow will be a “re- mote” lawyer, working from anywhere in the world where he or she has a good internet connection, freed from the shackles of a daily commute to a dreary
office, and then having to schlep back home again at night. We can take depo- sitions remotely, attend court remotely, and Zoom our way through meetings from our house at the beach or in the mountains or wherever we might want to live — because we won’t even have to live in the jurisdiction where we prac- tice. And, maybe we can even end the 50-state model for Bar admissions and allow lawyers to practice in any court in any city in any state anywhere in the country, with only one government (perhaps the feds?) licensing attorneys. No more multiple Bar admissions and pro hoc vice motions. The very concept of “local” counsel will become largely irrelevant because technology already allows any lawyer to be, to paraphrase Visa, “anywhere you want to be.”