President’s Message by Michael W. Robinson “The Times They Are A-Changin” Come gather around people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone And if your time to you is worth saving Then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changing Recent Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan penned those words fi fty-two years ago proclaiming the massive social, polit-ical, and generational changes under-way in the country. I thought of those lines when considering the changes our profession has recently seen and con-tinues to face. We lawyers can be slow to embrace change; remember, one of our key decision-making tools—prec-edent—relies on past decisions as an essential guide to settle current issues. But the scope and pace of change has hit like a fl ood, and as Dylan warned, we better start swimming. Numerous factors have driven the changes we see in the practice of law. But chief among them is the advent of technology and an Internet-based, e-connected populace and economy. The digital age has changed the way people obtain and exchange infor-mation, shop, communicate, make “friends,” learn, and do just about everything else. For lawyers, it has remade and spawned entire practice areas. It has changed the way we com-municate with clients and each other, changed the way we market and how clients — individual and corporate — choose lawyers, changed how we develop evidence and try cases, altered how we store sensitive client and busi-ness information, and brought new competitors and competitive pressures. The ABA and state bars and bar associations have attempted to examine the changing tides. The VSB committee studying the future practice of law recently issued its initial report (available at www.vsb.org). The com-mittee examined on-going changes in the profession, the external forces driving those changes, and the positive and negative disruptors to the pro-fession and legal market. It provided several specifi c recommendations, and identifi ed issues that require further attention. The report is available on the VSB website, and I encourage members of the bar to review it. The report examines many issues, and the following highlights just a few: • The access to justice gap is increasing, and legal services are out of reach for the economically disadvantaged and the middle class. In addition, eco-nomic and generational changes have led to a noticeable increase in pro se litigation. Courts are struggling to address programs to assist pro se litigants and to likewise narrow the access to justice gap. • Internet based non-lawyer providers of legal services and information are creating new competitive pressures. Avvo and Legal Zoom are perhaps the two best known. But in the last two years, more than 1,000 new non-law-yer legal start-up companies — not law fi rms — were formed. And there is signifi cant equity funding available for these start-ups; millions of dollars are being poured into them. The capital markets sense great opportu-nity in the unmet legal needs of the middle class. • Cyber security is, and will remain, a hot topic. The FBI has issued warn-ings that law fi rms are a frequent target of cyber-attacks, and many fi rms have already suffered breaches. Lawyers must be vigilant in making sure they are taking reasonable steps to protect their clients’ informa-tion in a digital world, an issue now expressly addressed in Rule 1.6 of the Rules of Professional Conduct. • Potential alternative business struc-tures — whether to allow non-lawyers to have ownership interests in law fi rms or the corporate practice of law — remains controversial. But the approach is gaining slow but steady ground in other countries. The traditional reasons for prohibiting non-lawyers from having an own-ership interest in a law fi rm must be reexamined. Analytically, it would seem that appropriate rules could be developed to safeguard our bedrock duties of loyalty, confi dentiality, and lawyer independence. But there is little empirical evidence or experi-ence, and the issue requires addition-al study. • Lawyer advertising and marketing are so different in the current informa-tion age that our rules regarding lawyer advertising, as well as sharing our fees and participation in third party “for profi t” referral services may need to be reexamined, making sure that the rules continue to serve public protection goals. Lawyers must recognize that participation in cer-tain referral or legal service programs President’s Message continued on page 13 10 VIRGINIA LAWYER | December 2016 | Vol. 65 www.vsb.org