NACUA Day Three

The third day of the conference started with a breakfast meeting of the Association, with the new Chair receiving the gavel. The organisation is very warm in its sentiments, and most of the speakers at the breakfast meeting were connected to their colleagues as dear friends. There were two tickets to next year's conference in Denver Colorado drawn from the registrant list, and we all got a Denver Cookie as above.

From there, some serious and on-topic sessions - another one on copyright litigation and then one on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) before lunch. My (dear friend and colleague) Ken had organised for all the foreign lawyers to have an Affinity Lunch, so we chomped through massive open sandwiches. Mostly the Australians turned up, but also some colleagues from elsewhere.

After lunch, a deadly serious session on conducting effective investigations with outside consultants, followed by a sponsored Ice Cream Break. It was mildly amusing watching my besuited colleagues struggling with icecreams and trying not to make a mess in a crowded, carpeted, room.

The final session for the day was by a fellow who is a whiz with automated documents - effectively setting up templates for frequently used legal precedents with a bit of special scripting to enable the lawyer to generate documents by filling out a checklist of names and numbers and a few options. Very slick - much could be done with just Word and Adobe Writer, but for the full Robolawyer one needed an added program like Hotdocs. Saving hours a week, minimum, looked well worth the investment of time.

Natch, there was One Guy who lamented not having all the documents for court in paper format, despite the modern fact that syncing the office e-records to a tablet or laptop is way more effective, reliable and (ahem) easy to carry. There is still a generation of tree-killing lawyers to go before we're achieving the dream: "Replace one printer per desk and one scanner for the office with one scanner per desk and one printer for the office".