by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
When matched up as adversaries on a case, lawyers pride themselves on making life difficult for each other. So when a lawyer goes out of his way to make life easier for other attorneys, the Florida Bar thinks the effort deserves special recognition.
This year, the Bar recognized Ron Owen, partner at Coker, Myer, Schickel, Sorenson and Green, as the winner of the Walter S. Crumbley award. The annual award is given each year to the Bar member who contributes the most to the improvement of the state’s law practice. The award is named after retired Administrative Law Judge Walter S. Crumbley, a leading advocate of practice management improvement.
Owen, a two-term past chair of the Bar’s Practice Management and Development Section, said he’d focused much of his efforts with the section in helping lawyers adapt technology for use in their practice.
“Technology can be overlooked by some lawyers, because a lot of it deals with mundane things like keeping records,” said Owen. “But it has tremendous potential in areas like legal research and in presenting evidence to a jury.”
During his time as chair of the practice management division, Owen led an initiative for the Bar to provide free Internet research facilities across Florida’s judicial districts.
Owen said the facilities are still being phased in, but the idea is to provide Internet at law libraries or in courthouses for attorneys that don’t have access. Owen estimates as many as 30 percent of Florida attorneys don’t have Internet access.
“A lot of young lawyers start their own practice and don’t have the
facilities to do computerized research,” he said. “Facilities like law libraries have gotten short shrift, so the idea was to make computer research more available.”
A self-confessed “technology geek,” Owen predicts that technology will make its greatest impact in evidence presentation. And it won’t all be positive. The more lawyers use digital photographs and computer generated recreations during trial, the greater the burden to ensure evidence authenticity, he said.
“Photographs as fundamental pieces of evidence were more reliable,” he said. “You have a negative, so there’s no question it’s authentic. Now, even the most basic digital camera can alter the appearance of photos.”
And the computer-generated recreations, increasingly used in auto accident and other liability cases to give the jury a first-hand perspective, can lead to extensive debates over their accuracy.
“It can be a very effective tool, you’re having a jury experience your view of what happened,” said Owen. “But it’s the burden of judges and lawyers to make sure that juries aren’t misled. Folks tend to believe what they see on TV.”
But Owen believes technology will be a net positive for the legal profession. But not everyone embraces it the way he does.
“Some lawyers choose not to use the Internet. Some of them are proud of the lack of technology in their practices,” said Owen.
Although he doesn’t dismiss the old-school approach, Owen thinks lawyers that don’t make use of technological advantages can give an edge to a technology-savvy adversary.
“In the abstract, sure it’s a disadvantage,” he said. “If I’m trying a case and I can do legal research on-site with my laptop, I might come up with a case immediately that could give me the argument on point.”