Here’s the introduction to his piece…..
All kinds of questions arise from the new (or newish) technology we use in legal practice. Should you communicate with your clients by text message, for example? The answer is probably not: there are security and privacy issues, privileged and confidential information may find its way to servers in the United States (and therefore be subject to scrutiny by U.S. government officials) and your chat history may be difficult — or impossible — to retrieve if you need to establish exactly what was said and when.
E-mail is a bit better, but not much. Common pitfalls are messages that get into the wrong hands because of an unthinking “reply all” or the autofill feature when you type a few letters in the recipient box. E-mail is for many a default filing system, and unless you have a lot of discipline or your IT department forces you to file e-mail in the document management (DM) system, you’ll be one of those people with 10,000 messages in the in-box and no easy way to sort through them.
Technology has also changed the way in which we communicate. It’s hard to imagine it now, but lawyers actually used to chat in hallways or the library, or call each other on the phone! Now, many just type away in the solitude of their offices. We write (or at least type) more. Law students will e-mail a question rather than call or pop their heads in the door. No wonder people in the legal profession suffer from high rates of loneliness and depression.
We also go through far more drafts of individual documents than in the days when it was a pain in the neck to have the typing pool revise a mostly final agreement. (Although perhaps there were more handwritten drafts before it got to the typing pool.) Legal authors can easily keep adding material between editions, resulting in shaggy, undisciplined texts.
Read the full article at https://www.thelawyersdaily.ca/articles/17068/legal-writing-in-the-digital-age-neil-guthrie
