Getting down to business: a valuable use of ATLA NET.

Important business to be done now!

You're the chair of a 25-person ATLA committee, and a very important topic has come up. Time is of the essence. You have a choice of several methods of communicating with group members:

You could call an immediate committee meeting. But this alternative would be costly, and many members from various locations around the country would probably be unable to attend.

You could get on the telephone and talk with each member. This would, of course, take a great deal of time and money, and you would come to understand the frustrations of phone tag.

You could send a fax to each member. Faxing seems to be the quickest and least expensive alternative, but if you send a five-page memo to each member and your firm charges $1 a page for faxes, you would ring up a $120 charge.

And, if you fax, the games begin. Overnight, George in Miami faxes you a page full of important comments, as do Leslie in Des Moines, Susan in San Francisco, and Gary in Boston. "Better get these comments out to our members," you think, so you put together another five-page fax and send that off.

During these back-and-forth faxing efforts, a number of different topics come up for further discussion. The games not only continue but go on with lots of time wasted and probably not much accomplished.

There is a better medium for such "discussions." It's called a private forum (or discussion) group on ATLA NET, the association's online service. Here's how it would work.

Instead of faxing the original memorandum to 24 members, you prepare the memo as an e-mail message with a product like Eudora Pro or the mail resources of an Internet browser such as Netscape's Communicator or Microsoft's Explorer. The completed message is uploaded to ATLA NET in a private discussion area. Automatically, the software sends private e-mail messages to each committee member.

Each member has learned to log on to ATLA NET every day to retrieve new mail and has received an exact copy of your message in his or her "in box." After downloading your message and pondering the text, members make their contributions to the forum by responding to your message. Just as your messages are broadcast to all the committee members, so too are the messages of each committee member broadcast to all other members.

More forums

You now see that several topics have surfaced just from these initial responses, so you organize a series of additional forums, each with its own specific focus. You must now divide subsequent commentary into separate messages, each message posted to a separate forum.

As more and more members find reason to comment, the e-mail traffic becomes substantial, and more ideas surface from the commentary and interaction of members through electronic telecommunication. Even members who are at trial are able to access the electronic forums with their laptop or notebook computers.

You have also used software that has a "bulletin board" feature, so in addition to each forum message being delivered directly to each member's in box, each message is preserved in a growing list of messages that members can access from any location at any time. Thus, catching up is swift and easy for those who enter the fray a bit late. (To see exactly what this list looks like, go to the "ATLA Discussion Groups" section of ATLA NET and click on "ATLA Forums." As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words.)

The result of all of this electronic telecommunicating is that members have engaged in a "meeting," albeit an electronic one, and have done so regardless of geographic location or time of day.

What is the value?

The value of this approach is that all members have had an opportunity to discuss the topics under consideration in great detail. When the face-to-face committee meeting does take place, members have already been informed about and may have debated the pros and cons of issues. They are ready to have a fully informed and final debate to draw conclusions and advance recommendations, rather than just be informed about developments since the last meeting. In fact, the last meeting continued in cyberspace.

In terms of dollars-and-cents value, let's assume that you already surf the Internet for an average of one hour a day.

Perhaps five minutes a day is devoted to actually uploading and downloading messages related to committee activities. That means that, at most, one-twelfth of your monthly Internet service provider cost is attributable to the committee.

Let's assume that your Internet service provider charges $19.95 a month. So, only $1.67 a month is attributable to your committee activities. That's a total of $41.75 a month divided among 25 members to take part in this communication. Compare that to the hundreds of dollars that would have had to be spent to fax committee members' correspondence.

Clearly, there's a key to all this, and the key is that all the members must be on the Internet and know how to use it. That means everyone must learn to use a computer and have some basic typing skills. In today's world, this should not be a problem since graphical user interfaces such as Netscape and Explorer have made using the Internet easy. A willing person can learn to use these computer-based technologies in about 15 to 30 minutes.

A bold proposal and why it will work

Just as lawyers haven't ridden horses to court in a long time, and just as we all learned to use photocopiers and fax machines, learning to communicate this way is just a new experience, and an easy one at that. So, choose to learn how to use a World Wide Web browser like Netscape and an e-mail package like Eudora.

Consider the advantages. Using the Internet is cost effective. Products like Netscape and Eudora are easy to use. A committee's ability to exchange information via the Internet is a modern miracle we can all take advantage of. Think about recent meetings you have attended. Think about key people who could not be present. Think about phone tag. Think about the costs of faxing. Think about how much time is spent at face-to-face meetings bringing everybody up to speed and how little time is spent debating issues and making decisions.

These benefits are so significant that you may ask, "Why aren't all of us telecommunicating now?" The answer is that most of us don't like change. We also don't like to learn anything new or different. But trial lawyers must have quick access to information, and we must be able to arrive at a consensus and move forward to further our best interests and those of our clients.

There is a catch to all of this, and it is that certain key people just won't learn to telecommunicate. And, if the key people won't learn, then not everyone is on board and telecommunicating isn't as effective as it could be.

The solution is simple. We all must learn to use e-mail and browser software. To make telecommunicating work, of course, bar associations must make using e-mail and electronic telecommunicating mandatory for committee members. Committee chairs and vice chairs must set the standard and make it clear that all who join a committee must either know how to use these technologies or learn how.

Like all new, fearsome activities, these technologies will prove to be easy and fun to use. And as powerful as this technology is for doing ATLA committee and section business, just imagine how important the exchange of messages and ideas will be for litigation groups. (More on this subject in a future column.)

Every member should use ATLA NET. If you are not presently using this service, contact Morgan Chiu, ATLA NET coordinator, at [phone], ext. 308. He will point you in the right direction.

Paul Bernstein is an attorney and law-office automation consultant in Chicago. He can be reached on the Internet at [e-mail]. Information about the products mentioned in this article is provided by the author and does not reflect an endorsement of any product by TRIAL or ATLA.