Today it has become fairly normal—in fact, expected in many instances—to remotely access things that used to be entirely in-person affairs. Speaker events offer webcasts in addition to physical spaces, work is a mix of in-office and virtual office, and courts have largely transitioned to virtual hearings. Although, the modern environment of a remote legal profession remains, in some ways, a work in progress.
“Washington state courts led the country as early adopters of remote technology but we have not yet adopted statewide rules or statutes allowing its permanent use,” write the authors of the cover story featured in the latest issue of Washington State Bar News. “Now is the time.”
Explaining “Rules of the Remote,” the co-chairs of the Board of Judicial Administration’s Remote Proceedings Work Group, Hon. James E. (Jim) Rogers and Hon. Angelle Gerl, share the proposed amendments and new rules recently published for comment.
“The proposed rule amendments would allow the continuation of current post-pandemic practices that have emerged in many superior and limited jurisdiction courts, from King to Pend Oreille and from Walla Walla to Pierce Counties,” write Rogers and Gerl. “Our goal was to remove any barriers to remote proceedings.”
Courts struggled to transition to a new way of work in the pandemic, but there’s another struggle that has been endemic to the legal profession for much longer. Alcohol and other substance use have historically been a staple among lawyers. So much so that one of the first comprehensive studies of substance use disorder and related risk factors in the legal profession found that 20.6 percent of surveyed legal professionals self-reported hazardous, harmful, and potential alcohol-dependent drinking—a rate about twice as high as the wider highly educated workforce. The same study found that attorneys are more likely to self-report depression, anxiety, stress, and suicidal thoughts.
Leslie Hagin knows this all too well.
“I am an attorney and an alcoholic/addict,” writes Hagin, a lawyer now in recovery from addiction. “It took me decades to admit the last two ‘As’ in that description, or even consider that my drinking and drug ‘habits’ might have had any sort of adverse consequences in my life or the lives of others.”
Also in this issue of Bar News, Amanda K. Stephen, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Washington School of Law, explores the emerging trickiness of citing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in legal writing. Sharing what she learned at the Association of American Law Schools conference in Washington, D.C., Stephen attempts to answer two fundamental questions:
- If you use GenAI to draft a piece of writing, do you need a citation telling the reader as much?
- If you are simply citing to content produced by GenAI, what should that citation look like?
Then hear from Sarah N. Harmon, staff director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Gonzaga University School of Law, about the university’s new Name & Gender Marker ID Change Pop-up Clinic and the Lincoln LGBTQ+ Rights Clinic.
This issue of Bar News also features an ethics column on reducing ambiguity in law firm risk management, a report from the WSBA executive director on the Bar’s FY 24 strategic goals, an introduction to the Senior Lawyers Section, discipline notices, and much more.
