Launching Toward A New Challenge

My age is not a secret that I closely guard; in fact, I don’t guard it at all. Since I don’t shout my birthday on social media, because I don’t want to give identity thieves more for their arsenals than they already get from the hacks that have exposed personal details for millions of folks, I’d prefer that you not dox me to show that you can do so.

Prior to entering what was then the School of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University more than thirty years ago, I was a practicing lawyer. I last worked as a solo practitioner, as evidenced by the sign photo above. Practicing law was not a remunerative, nor particularly enjoyable, career for me. Hence, I chose to get a new degree and begin a career as a law librarian. Regardless of how you might weigh that career choice, there can be no argument that I have been much more successful as a law librarian and legal technologist than I had been as a lawyer. It has also been a much more enjoyable career!

Among my activities during the past twelve years or so has been teaching an introductory course on introducing law students to technology used in legal practice. I have pushed for the need to bring such courses to law school for nearly twenty years; my former colleague Wayne Miller and I published an article making our argument in 2004, and we launched our course at Duke a few years later. Shannon Kemen and I brought the course to the University of Cincinnati in 2010. In both courses I’ve had the good fortune to invite guest speakers who helped show our students the changes that technology brings to practicing law. Technology is not a panacea, and nothing that helps a lawyer really could be, but it has made a sea change since I left the practice more than thirty years ago.

More than once in the time that I’ve been teaching this subject, I have felt a desire to put into practice the technologies and techniques we’ve discussed in the class. Concepts such as the “paperless law office,” “virtual law practice,” and applications including cloud-based client management systems with timekeeping have made practice for the solo or small firm today much different than it was when I left to become a librarian.

In our family’s life, my wife Lisa and I have been dealing with the challenge of a split household since she and our son Micah moved back to North Carolina in 2016. I had been hoping for the opportunity to secure a librarian position near them since then, but no such opportunities arose. By the middle of 2018 I knew that I would be heading back sooner or later, and I began contemplating returning to law practice as one potential avenue for professional work once I returned. I started discussing the idea with Lisa and others, and I reviewed the requirements for seeking admission to practice in North Carolina. (I will discuss those in a future post.) By early October I had committed myself to sitting for the July 2019 administration of the bar exam.

Just over a month after that decision, Lisa and I agreed that it was time for me to stop waiting for a perfect employment opportunity and instead plan to come home. Right after Thanksgiving I informed our dean that I would be retiring from UC by late summer 2019, so I could rejoin my family. With that the die was cast.