Chuck Norton, of Riding the Third Wave, says faxes should go the way of the dinosaur (via Law.com).  Having watched the growth of technology in the practice of law since an IBM Selectric III was the hottest thing going, and come to have a love/hate relationship with it all, I’m constrained to disagree.

Chuck’s argument is twofold.  First, fax machines are costly and mechanical, meaning that they take some work and money to keep going.  Second, with the advent and pervasiveness of email, there’s just no need to send a fax anymore.  In his mind, anyone who still sends faxes is just an old fart, stuck in his ways and demonstrating his inflexibility.

When the fax machine first surfaced as a necessary tool of business, I hated it.  It used to take a few days to mail a piece of paper to someone (recognizing that no one waste the money on overnight unless it was really necessary).  This meant that the few days you would have between sending and receiving a document gave everyone a breather.  You put it in the mail and were guaranteed not to hear anything further about it for at least 2 days.  That died with the fax.

Suddenly, someone faxed you something and you were expected to respond within seconds.  I had one jerk who used to fax me papers that included his demand that I respond with the hour.  Bite me.  I’ll respond whenever I’m damn good and ready.  But he was persistent, and an hour later, I would get another fax, and another.  The fax meant empowerment to pipsqueaks without enough to do.  My point is that I’m no fan of faxes.

But email has some inherent flaws of its own that, in my opinion, prevent it from ever replacing either a fax or a hard copy.  For one thing, when you send a letter by fax, it’s still a letter.  It has your letterhead on top, and a regularly structured body below.  We know how to address it, what the salutation looks like and how to cobble together a body with the formality, or lack thereof, that we intend.  Emails have nothing comparable.

Most emails begin “Hi Joe” and then rush into the message.  When you write “Dear Mr. Smith” in an email, it just looks silly.  The medium is too informal for that.  Same with the “very truly yours” at the bottom.  It’s just wrong. But I have no plans of sending Assistant United States Attorneys the same type of emails that I send my friends.  The feeling is all wrong, and that sends the wrong message.

Then there’s the signature.  What signature?  That’s the point.  It’s the “electronic” signature of typing out your name.  Well, that’s no signature.  It’s not a signature if you typed your name but didn’t actually sign it on a letter, and it’s no better in an email. 

There is always the pdf attachment, making the email merely the means of conveying the pdf of the letter.  One way of doing this is saving your letter as a pdf, though it will still lack a signature.  The other is scanning the letter to make a pdf out of it after it’s been signed.  But that means that I’ve now doubled my work, having prepared, printed and signed the letter, which now has to be scanned back into the computer, and attached to an email.  Why would I want to go through all these steps rather than just stick the letter in the fax?

Plus, there are a bunch of things we send that we are just passing along and didn’t create ourselves.  These things would all have to go through the prolonged scanning process, email process, etc., when they could just be faxed directly without any greater effort than dialing a telephone number.

So while I may be a technology troglodyte for eschewing the email as savior, I see some merit in the fax when compared to the alternative.  But I want to add my support for sending papers through the mail.  Remember when law firms used heavy weight Crane’s bond for their engraved letterhead?  Now it’s just computer generated images on copy paper.  And lawyer bond was used for motions.  Now copy paper again.  There’s no style to it anymore.  There’s no sense of pride in the handling of a fine piece of paper.  And don’t even talk about spellcheck.

So I vote to toss the crackberrys in the ocean, lose all the tech that has created immediacy when we need some breathing room, and stolen what little was left of the finer sensibilities of our profession.  But I’ll keep the email, just so I can pass along the really funny jokes to a few good friends.  I didn’t say it was a total waste.