More than a decade ago, I was visiting family in Italy when early one morning I checked my email. It was all “pull” mobile email at that time, which meant that I had to open my email client, push a button to check email, then wait about 30 seconds where messages I wrote before were sent, and the new messages were downloaded to my phone. It was slow by today’s standards, but I still remember being amazed I could send and check email remotely.
I had received an email with an urgent request from a client in California who needed a document “that night” (it was maybe 11 p.m. in California, 2 a.m. in New York, and 8 a.m. where I was in Italy). Our firm was even smaller then, and I had no hope of finding someone promptly to find and send the document. But I was on the streets of Rome. What could I do?
Well, I was somehow able to “remote in” from my Palm Treo “smartphone” to our physical server in the office, find the document, then email it from my workstation in New York — all while standing in front of an Italian caffe (they call them bars) as two older guys argued, in Italian, about how bad the Italian national team was.
It was the first time I remember realizing how you truly can be an advocate for your clients no matter where they are and no matter where you are in the world.
Fifteen years or more later, any lawyer who doesn’t realize that, and who doesn’t ensure that she can be a mobile trial lawyer wherever she is, simply is not going to be able to fight for her clients the way she should.
What does that mean, to be a mobile trial lawyer? Basic mobile phone and email is obvious, but I perhaps also obviously mean more than that. My colleagues and I at our firm know that it means having mobile editing programs on our phones and tablets so we can review and edit our papers. We have Word and similar programs on our mobile devices. We can access any documents or the hordes of data we maintain in our (triple backed up) cloud server from wherever we are in the world.
Younger lawyers do tend to be better about this, and most lawyers do know much of this. But I’m routinely surprised at hearing how lawyers don’t know how to remote into their office databases, or that they can’t write a document on an iPad, or “need paper” such that reviewing and editing documents on a tablet is verboten.
Those lawyers aren’t simply falling behind in being the best lawyers they can be. They are not as available to work for their clients as they should be.
There needs to be a balance between work and non-work, and I’m not suggesting you actually do work wherever you go at any time. But to fight and win for our clients we trial lawyers have to be ready to do exactly that.
John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at [email protected].
