Of Faxes, Glasses and iToy 6

My daughter’s iPhone 6 (not the 6S, because bendy) arrived, and it fell to me to make it work.  She’s an Apple aficionado, in contrast to my slavish devotion to DOS-based equipment.  Her prior phone was the iPhone 4S, because Siri.

I tried chatting with Siri some, and she’s really not very interesting or informative.  She was cute when I asked her for the answer to life, the universe and everything. She got it right.  Someone at Apple has a sense of humor.

But the deal for the iPhone 6 was too good to pass up. Aside from the absurd secondary charges that apply to anyone foolish enough to remain with Verizon, the phone was free. I couldn’t say no.

Even though the Verizon store couldn’t deliver on their television commercials for lack of phones without any foreseeable date of delivery, I was able to order it over the phone, and “recycle” the old one at the store. Of the many things that Verizon does in conflict with law and reason, this turned out to be relatively painless. Like suicide.

While standing around waiting for a chipper youth to serve me, I saw a rather large display of watches.  My view wasn’t blocked at all. The store was filled with shoppers, but they were all searching for smartphones. The watch display was a ghost town.  Another big splash digital product that no one wants.

Having plenty of time with nothing to do, I mused about other such concepts, and Google Glass came to mind.  With that, I thought of Jeffrey Taylor’s, the droid lawyer, post following the #ReinventLaw presentation by Andy Ninh, a law student of Dan Katz, one of the Reinvent Law founders.  Jeffrey questioned the premises of Andy’s enthusiasm for Google Glass, which generated this twitter exchange:

This stuck in my head, as reflecting one of the foremost stumbling blocks to new technology and the ReinventTheNewNormalOfLaw crowd. The only thing disruptive about it is their refusal to engage in any discussion that doesn’t involve adoration.  Jeffrey, by the way, is far kinder about such things than I, so arguments that if only skeptical curmudgeons weren’t so damn mean, acolytes would be happy to engage, fall flat.  Sure, they say that, but they lie.

In the comments to Jeffrey’s post, a personal injury lawyer named Mitch Jackson takes him to task

I know Andy and he’s an amazing young man who enthusiastically talks about innovation and even disruption in the profession. How exciting it must have been for Andy to share thoughts and ideas about wearable technology including Google Glass.

As I was there to see Andy’s presentation, and had a chance to speak with him afterward, he did an excellent job.  But this has nothing to do with Andy, per se.

Here’s the deal. Just like all the lawyers who didn’t think fax technology would ever take off and become part of the practice of law, I respectfully think lawyers who criticize (your word) and even ridicule forward thinkers of mobile and wearable technology will also eventually find themselves on the wrong side of history.

I hated the fax machine. Still do. But also realized very quickly that it filled a need and was adopted immediately. Facsimile machines were the only game in town for the immediate transmission of documents.  I wish they were never invented, but their utility couldn’t be denied.  But the success of the fax offers nothing about the hundreds of technological failures. One would expect a lawyer to present a more logical argument.

Having said that, rather than criticize (again your word) someone about his vision of the future, especially a future involving new mobile and wearable technology that lawyers can use and clients can benefit from, why not stand and applaud someone for being brave enough to take the stage and share his passions, thought and ideas- right or wrong?

When someone takes the stage, he owns whatever subject he speaks to.  A fabulous presentation about why disparate racial treatment is justified is unlikely to be applauded because of its fine delivery and passion. Granted, Google Glass isn’t nearly as offensive, but again, this wasn’t a condemnation of Andy but of Google Glass and irrational exuberance and defensiveness of its promoters.

In closing, had the article been focused on just mobile or wearable technology I’d be fine with your thoughts and opinions. What I wasn’t comfortable with was the personal direction it started off with and took re Andy and the Re-Invent Law group. Completely not necessary.

Just as Andy opened himself to question by taking the stage at ReinventLaw, so did Jeffrey in challenging the presentation.  So Mitch Jackson didn’t care for the way he did it. Big deal.  You can’t please everybody.

Jeffrey’s post was from last February.  See lawyers running around the courthouse wearing Google Glass?  No? Not too many. Don’t care?  The police in Dubai are wearing them, to enable facial recognition of the bad dudes. They use Bugatti Veyron’s and Lambos for pursuit too.

But if I wanted to spend more than $1500 on something wearable, I would go for a bespoke suit.  And if I wanted to access the interwebz from the courthouse, I would pull my Droid Maxx out of my pocket.  And when I decide what to wear on my wrist, you can bet it will require hand winding.  And if you think my choices are poor, you can feel free to tell me so.  But I probably won’t care, and I certainly won’t give you a tummy rub because you’re so cutting edge and early adopter-y.

The iPhone 6, however, looks pretty good. I hope my daughter likes it as much as she liked her iPhone 4S.

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14 thoughts on “Of Faxes, Glasses and iToy 6”

  1. Charles B. "Brad" Frye

    Harrumph. Fax machines. Abominations before God. I hated them with a passion previously reserved for beepers. (However, I did so love my IBM Selectric. Something Da Vinci or Edison would have approved.)

    I still believe the most perfect system to create the written word (on screen or paper) is the dictation of the content to a transcriptionist. (“Secretary” in the old days.) It appears that this art form of office work is lost to us.

    But, to prove that an “early adopter” can be an old trickless dog, I must point out that fax machines are woefully out of date. A scanner with an online “e-fax” service is much preferable.

    I make this point only in service to the larger one – adoptIng technology is about, and will always be about, utility. Ease of use. Reliability. Labor savings. The “cool factor” ranks far down the list.

    My Crackberry has a wonderful calendar function. Do I still carry a hard copy calendar? Of course. Why? Ease of use. Reliability. Because Federal Judges hate smartphones in their courtrooms. (One of the many ways they are exactly like justices of the peace in small Texas towns.)

    I still remember as a young lawyer being able to tell who was the studliest lawyer in the room : it wasn’t the one with the beeper and the shoebox-sized phone and the thermal sheet fax printouts. It was the lawyer who had one or more associates accompanying him and carrying the beepers, the “mobile” phones and the fax printouts.

    Brad Frye
    Houston

    1. SHG Post author

      My first office purchase was an IBM Selectric III, with a variety of typeface balls. I loved that machine. We had a thermal copier in the office, which was no substitute for carbon paper as the copies faded to blank quickly.

      I refused to get a beeper. Numerous clients offered to buy me one (most of my clients bought beeper in bulk), but I refused to be “beeped.” They would call, and I would return their call if I was unavailable at the time. And when I mailed out a letter, I would have a few days before I would receive a response.

      Young lawyers may find this impossible to believe, and worse yet, unbearably slow and unwieldly. To the contrary, the lack of immediacy was wonderful. We had room to breath. And while correcting a typo in the middle of a motion was a royal pain in the ass, real estate contracts had two page riders tops, as no one typed any more than they absolutely had to. There is a reason why we call them “briefs.”

  2. John Burgess

    Seeing that the first fax machine was patented in 1843, I’d say the technology had a period of mellowing before it reached widespread acceptance. Of course, newer tech does tend to be picked up rather more quickly. Perhaps it, too, needs a ~90-year period of mellowing before its best uses can be discovered?

  3. Patrick Maupin

    If everyone always wore google glasses, then we’d know what really happened to mattress girl.

    Just sayin’

      1. Patrick Maupin

        Good point. Well, maybe we’d still have the audio, assuming the microphone didn’t get completely covered with chocolate sauce or whipped cream.

  4. bmaz

    We had fax very early in my firm because, as you say, the utility was just obvious. Personally I also very early had a scanner as I saw what that could mean. But I was ahead of the usefulness curve on that one. It was a huge, and ungodly expensive (seriously, you could have bought a perfectly serviceable used car for that money), HP thing. But it would only do one page at a time – no paper feed – and merging multiple pages into one doc, and keeping the file size less than gargantuan, was such a process that it was near impossible. Which meant it really wasn’t often useful because storage and transmission capacities were microscopic compared to what you can do today. It was basically a piece of art that took up half of the top of my credenza. Then, a few years later, this little thing with rollers that you could easily feed your docs through called a Paperport came on the market and it was actually usable. Not that expensive either.

    Now the office copier does it all, copy scan and fax. Progress is wonderful sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.

    1. SHG Post author

      As copiers became copiers, scanners, faxes, etc., it all made more sense somehow. Then they started requiring me to put in codes, and I lost interest again. I hate codes.

      1. bmaz

        I have no stinking codes. And I charge enough that I don’t bill clients per piece of paper. You just use the damn thing as you need.

  5. Keith Lynch

    Concerning iPhone 6 availability, I went to the local (Tysons) mall
    yesterday, and there was *still* a line of people outside the store
    waiting to buy the thing.

    I’ve been shopping at that mall for 46 years, but it’s been years
    since I bought anything there except books and DVDs. Oh, I did buy a
    hat two years ago, but it disintegrated the first time I put it in the
    washing machine.

  6. Jake DiMare

    I was an early adopter of Google Glass. It was too nerdy, even for me. They’re back in the original packaging slowly waiting for the day when a set of the original GG in mint condition is worth enough on eBay for a boat. May be a long wait, but I’m eating better and exercising more.

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