TO-WIT: MY LIFE AS A GIGABYTE
I am in a bit of a depression. I know what you’re thinking, here we go again, right, but, really, this one is different. This is not like the one in which I walk into the office first thing in the morning and rip up the office plants by their roots, and this is not like the one in which I throw all of my fingernail clippings into my secretary’s precious goldfish bowl with vulgar glee. No, this one is really quite different.
It’s late fall now, usually a happy time for me, a time when leaves turn to color, a time when the citizenry, sensing the advent of Advent, is generally not as heartless and litigious as usual. Thus, with a less demanding schedule, I have more time to spend with the love of my life; she enjoys it tremendously and it’s a really good way for me to improve my litigation skills.
It is also at this season of the year that I am recently returned from my bar association’s annual bench-bar conference, and therein lies this latest installment of angst. The conference is a wonderful event, an occasion when many of us retreat for the weekend to some nearby resort to attend seminars, to play golf and to drink in public. It’s the one time of the year we can let down our hair in the presence of our colleagues without fear of being scalped.
Now normally I come away from the conference feeling refreshed and invigorated by such deception. Not this year, though, as I have been in a funk ever since I returned home.
It started the afternoon of the second day, right after the golf tournament. My foursome had won the trophy for the most inventive score card, and even though our victory had been appealed to the Bar Association’s Ad Hoc Golf Tournament Honesty Review Board, I was nonetheless feeling particularly mellow and content; my best lawyer friend was Acting Commissioner. After a quick shower and a beer chaser, I found myself strolling along the row of display booths set up by the sundry vendors of law-related services and commodities. The usual purveyors were there, offering the latest in legal research, banking and title insurance services, police and ambulance scanners and the like. This year however my attention was drawn to a company that described itself as a specialist in document management. Since I was unfamiliar with the service, I stopped to ask a few questions.
The gentleman in charge was delighted to see me; since he wasn’t passing out any free samples of candy, ball-point pens, tote bags or keychains, no other lawyers had stopped. His company specialized in computer storage of files, and he told me he could store all of my closed files on disk, thereby eliminating the need for me to retain both the old files themselves and the office space required to store them.
When I told him I had about 4000 closed files, he held up what looked like a small computer hard drive with USB cable attached, and allowed as how all 4000 of them could be stored on less than one, count ‘em, less than one of those devices. At first, I was taken aback. Then I took affront.
“Just one,” I said. “You mean all my files, my entire career, can fit on this two inch square device? That it, just one.”
“Well, they do hold 500 gigabytes of information,” he said, as if he thought that would somehow offer solace.
Now it’s true my closed files take up a lot of office space that could probably be put to better use, and it’s also true that I have for some time been considering some type of file storage arrangement. But I have often taken such great pleasure from wandering into my file room and gazing at that semi-vast expanse of metal cabinets and paper folders. I stand there amidst the divorces, the wrongful deaths, the custody wars, the will contests, the malpractice suits, the huffings and puffings of the disparate lives of the disparate people who have found their way into my practice, and I reflect on what and where I’ve been as a lawyer. The physical presence of all those files is something of a comfort to me. They stand as corporeal testimony to my career, and when it comes to their final resting place, storage by gigabyte had simply not occurred to me. I’d been thinking more along the lines of a mosque.
When I first started my career, I wanted to change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel in my bare hands. As a small town general practitioner though, I’m not going to leave behind the kind of legacy I first dreamed of when I started law school. However, I do like to think that I’ve brought some measure of esprit to my practice and that I’ve imbued my clients and their causes with a fair degree of energy and passion. That may be my only legacy, and my files may be its only physical remnant. However, it now appears that, by the wave of some techno-magic wand, my entire career can be stripped bare-wire clean of emotion and converted into a pedestrian string of O’s and 1’s, and not even a very long string at that.
So after having given the matter due consideration, I have decided not to digitize. I simply could not bear to see my entire career reduced to a storage device that can be carried around in someone’s coat pocket. I need for my files to take three strong men three full days to cart out of my office after I’m gone. I’ve been a good lawyer now for almost fifty years and I will not settle for less. How else will anyone know I’ve been here?
© 2018, S. Sponte. Esq.