A trend emerging, I believe, from the competitive landscape is that
the AmLaw 100 are "pulling away," competitively, from the AmLaw 101-200.
So when a star among the "second 100," like Boies-Schiller, misses
a calendar deadline that goes all the way up to the 9th Circuit, attention must be paid.
More interesting from the perspective of this blog is the debate articulated
by the judges:
“In the modern world of legal practice, the delegation of repetitive legal tasks to paralegals has become a necessary fixture. Such delegation has become an integral part of the struggle to keep down the costs of legal representation,” Schroeder wrote.
But Judge Alex Kozinski, who was joined by M. Margaret McKeown and Pamela Ann Rymer in dissent, would have none of it.
“While delegation may be a necessity in modern law practice, it can’t be a lever for ratcheting down the standard for professional competence,” Kozinski wrote. “If it’s inexcusable for a competent lawyer to misread the rule, it can’t become excusable because the lawyer turned the task over to a non-lawyer.”
“The error here — whether made by the lawyer, the calendaring clerk or the candlestick maker — is inexcusable.”
There you have it, courtesy of the 9th Circuit: Is, indeed, the tradeoff
between the modern and integral necessity of keeping down costs and
dumbing down professional standards? This is a debate the last
of which we have not heard.
My answer, in case you asked, is that technology will enable even-higher
professional standards (cf. the ability of pharmaceutical software
to pick up on dangerous drug interactions without human oversight)
while also bringing down costs, certainly for commodity issues like
making filing deadlines.
