Remaking the Courts and Law Firms of the Nation: Industrial Age to the Information Age 31 Texas Tech Law Review 2000

31 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 1151 (2000)
Remaking the Courts and Law Firms of the Nation: Industrial Age to the Information Age

handle is hein.journals/text31 and id is 1171 raw text is: REMAKING THE COURTS AND LAW FIRMS OF
THE NATION: INDUSTRIAL AGE TO THE
INFORMATION AGE*
by Honorable Arthur M Monty Ahalt'
Cyberspace, virtual community, infocosm, information superhighway,
Internet, WAN, LAN, modem, memory, windows-what does it all mean to
the lawyer, the judge and the court clerk?
Alvin & Heidi Toffler in their book, Creating a New Civilization, put it
this way: Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest
social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly
recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from
the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave. According to the
Tofflers, the Third Wave is bringing our world, including the legal profession,
into a new way of life.2
The Third Wave brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on
diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make
most factory assembly lines obsolete.... The emergent civilization writes a
new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization,
synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy,
money and power.'
Thus, the infocosm evolves.4
INFOCOSM, a word coined by Andersen Consulting, is defined as a
virtual world unconstrained by time, place or form; a world where computing,
communicating and content converge.' The infocosm is not a thing of the
future, it is here today.6 The infocosm enables the public and private working
environments of today to be citizen-centered.7 It is enabling public and
* Substantial portions of this article were excerpted from VirtualCourthouse.Com written by the
Honorable Arthur M. Monty Ahalt. VirtualCourthouse.Com is an online publication dedicated to the new
electronic legal environment. Back issues of VirtualCourthouse.Com can be accessed at
<http://www.mdlaw.net/ahalt/> (last visited April 25, 2000).
** Judge Ahalt retired from the Circuit Court for Prince Georges County, Maryland in 1999 after
17 years. He is currently Vice President and Chief Industry Advisor for JusticeLink, Inc.
1. ALvIN & HEII ToFraE, CREATING A NEw CvLIzATiON: THE PoLmTIcs OF ThE THIRD WAVE
19(1994).
2. See id. at 19.
3. Id. at 19-20.
4. See Anderson Consulting (visited Mar. 19, 2000) <http://www.ac.com> (defining the word
infocosm').
5. Id.
6. See id.
7. See id.

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