20 | The Summation
The Only Thing Constant Is Change by Judge Ross Goodman are. What meaning you ascribe to them, if any, is up to you. The point I want to make is that there has been an increase in the percentage of women and black lawyers over the last 45 years. This has changed the Escambia-Santa Rosa Bar Association. And, more change is to be expected. So what is this change going to look like?
Photo by August de Richelieu from Pexels
I took a break the other day and noticed, outside my office, there are three pictures that depict the members of the Escambia-Santa Rosa Bar in 1975, 1980 and 1999-2000 (I note that the pictures do not contain all of the members). I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. In 1975, all the members pictured were men, and only one of the men was black. In 1980, there were only eight women lawyers pictured and one black lawyer. Before going to the third picture, I thought surely, there must be progress between 1980 and 1999. And there was: three women judges, 49 women lawyers and two black lawyers (out of 399 lawyers pictured). The percentage of female lawyers had reached 13 percent.
I found this interesting. I expected continued increase in the number of women and black lawyers in the 25-year span. So, I wondered, how do the numbers look today? Out of 700 members, 153 are women and eight are black. (These numbers are drawn from the pictures posted on the Bar’s website which, again, does not reflect all members.) In the 20 years from 1999– 2000 to today, the percentage of women lawyers had risen to 23 percent. Black lawyers went from .005 percent in 1999–2000 to .011 percent. No, this is not some liberal diatribe on sexism and racism. No, this is not a scolding or any kind of condemnation. The numbers are what the numbers
Law Schools now hover around 50 percent men and women. The percentages of black law students is going up as well. Demographically, the trend from 1975 to today will continue, and likely will increase at a faster rate. Technology over the time period has also changed dramatically. In 1975, copies were by mimeograph (look it up) or carbon paper; there were no computers, let alone the powerful gigabyte memory laptop computers of today. Correspondence was dictated on a tape recorder and handtyped by the secretary. They at least did have electric typewriters back then. If you wanted to cut and paste something, that’s what you did...with scissors and glue. The practice of law changed as well. Professionalism replaced the “gotcha” style of the practice of law. The rules changed requiring more disclosure and imposing
sanctions for dilatory or unethical work. We went from tracing the history of a case by looking in books, to the Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc. software today. Technology has changed exponentially. “Between 2000 and 2017 three critical things happened simultaneously in the technology universe: (1) computer processing power increased from 103 to 107 ; (2) the cost of data storage reduced from $12.4 per GB to $0.004 per GB; and (3) there was astronomically large data growth. In other words, we are now in an age when it’s easy to harness computer power to engage in learning; it’s cheap, and there are massive amounts of data from which to learn.” The Future of Law Firms (and Lawyers) in the Age of Artificial Intelligence ABA Journal, Vol. 27 No. 1 (Anthony E. Davis) [Anthony Davis is Of Counsel at Clyde & Co US LLP. He is a Lecturer in Law at Columbia University Law School and a Past President of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers.] For me, this tectonic change was relatively gradual. But I am nearing the end of my career. For those of you in the beginning or the middle of your careers, the change will accelerate as well as increase in magnitude.
