VoxPopuLII
by G. Burgess Allison
The pioneer is a curious thing. In the Old Days, pioneers were pretty easy to understand: There’s a mountain way over there that nobody’s crossed before—why don’t we cross it and see what’s on the other side? But as we tamed our various geographical wilderni, pioneers had to tell much more difficult stories: No seriously, we’re gonna use electricity to talk to each other. But of course we’ll have to hook up Really Long Wires between every building in the country. (Well, until we switch to fiber.)
Cornell’s Legal Information Institute stands as one of those pioneers—one that was faced with telling a difficult story to a generally skeptical and plainly technophobic audience:
No seriously, there’s this thing called the Internet. (And—we’re off to a rocky start already.) It’ll give us the opportunity to radically transform access to information of significance to the entire legal profession.
Really? Like Lexis and Westlaw? Because we have that already.
No, no, think broader than that. And access will be free.
Free? Who’s gonna do headnotes and Key Numbers for “all information” … for free?
Oh man, you just don’t get it. The whole world is gonna change.
No I don’t. Call me when the world has changed.
Here’s the thing about pioneers. First and most importantly, after exploring the wilderness, after falling into traps and digging themselves out again, after making mistakes and learning lessons the hard way, they come back to the rest of us and tell everything! Pioneers suffer all the personal pains of trailblazing, then return with the stories and findings, and with just a little bit of nurturing tell you exactly how to avoid all the difficulties. With a tiny amount of encouragement, they’ll even offer to go out again and guide you along the way.
25 years ago, that’s exactly what we needed. Tom Bruce and Peter Martin had the vision to see transformative change over the horizon, then set up shop to provide a home for experiments and new opportunities. The LII was built to explore and try things out. Some of those things would succeed, some would fail—but as we watched and followed the LII we learned that each effort was rolled out with a genuine enthusiasm and an open mind for the possibilities. Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is not a judgment-free zone where every player wins a trophy. This is an ENTJ wilderness with an embarrassingly-high score in Judging. Technologies that don’t make it get pushed aside in a heartbeat. Of course this is difficult for a laboratory like the LII. Intellectually, you want to give each new technology time—time to show what it can do, time to make mistakes and attempt corrections, time to mature. But realistically, tempus fugits faster on the Internet than anywhere else—the Internet does not embrace patience. Any more than the legal profession embraces change.
Speaking of which … while the profession has well earned its reputation for resisting change (cf. IBM mag card typewriters), that does not mean the entire profession stuck its head in the technological sand. Indeed, as an occasional speaker at the American Bar Association’s annual TECHSHOW conference, I was stunned at the audiences we drew on Internet-related topics: we filled the hallways when they put us in a smaller room; and we still went SRO when they put us in a bigger room. So high was the enthusiasm (and so compelling was the pioneer spirit to share what people had discovered) that some already-robust panel discussions turned quickly into even-more-robust audience discussions as discoveries and new web sites were shouted from the audience. The topic became lightning in a bottle. One of the most popular programs at TECHSHOW became Sixty Sites in Sixty Minutes. The excitement was palpable.
Certainly I was excited about what was happening as well. In my own case, I was fortunate enough to have an outlet in the column I wrote for the ABA’s Section of Law Practice, Technology Update. I tried, ever so hard, to explain to my readership just how big a change was coming. The responses I got showed an intense level of interest, but a continued lack of information. That in turn led to writing The Lawyers Guide to the Internet—which included Erik Heel’s groundbreaking list of online legal resources, The Legal List, and Lyonette Louis-Jacques’ list of law-related discussion groups, Lawlists. While Lawyers Guide barely scratched the surface of Internet basics, it became the best-selling title in the ABA’s book publishing program. Interest was high.
Two quick notes about Lawyers Guide: First, it speaks volumes about how far we’ve come that Erik’s Legal List could actually contain every law-related web site and online resource. Second, the first drafts of Lawyers Guide didn’t include this “new” technology called web sites—they hadn’t been invented yet. They were added during the review of proof pages—not normally the time you would make such a significant change (with sincere gratitude to the ABA book program). The only screen shot of a web page in the book came from the first and most prominent hypertext-enabled law-related web site. At www.law.cornell.edu.
The LII was site #1 in what I called Burge’s Bookmarks. And it was featured so many times in the Sixty Sites programs that we eventually retired it to Hall of Fame status—to make room for sites and capabilities that were newer and less well-known.
The LII was, and remains, the best of the wilderness. A place where pioneers are welcomed, to experiment and try things out. A place where the Rest Of Us can come and see what the pioneers are up to. And a place where the pioneers are so excited about what they’re doing that they just can’t help but share what they’ve learned.
Thank you LII, thank you Tom and Peter … now back to work, there’s so much more to be done!
I love technology. 🙂
G. Burgess Allison is a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management and is an active member of the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Section (LPMS). He wrote the “Technology Update” column in Law Practice Management magazine for 18 years, and authored “The Lawyer’s Guide to the Internet.”, the best-selling publication in the history of the ABA’s book-publishing program. He has served on the Council for LPMS, and as Publisher and Technical Editor for LPM magazine. Burgess has a J.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from the University of Delaware. Prior to his retirement, he was the IT Director for MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD).
