Visiting museums and art galleries is an essential part of the experience of visiting new places. That is not to say that I do not from time to time visit museums in this country with which I am already familiar but the collections which tend to stand out in my mind are those which are housed in a building either especially made for the purpose of displaying the paintings, furniture and sculpture or are even in the artist’s own house or the house of a major collector. I visit these more often in a town or city in a foreign country because while visiting foreign parts it is likely that there is more time available “to stand and stare”.
The Sorolla Museum in Madrid and the Jacquemart-Andre Museum in Paris, “the passion of Edouard Andre and Nelie Jacquemart,” are collections housed in the artist’s and the collectors’ houses respectively, whereas the magnificent Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid is in a refurbished palace designed to show off the fabulous collection of pictures collected by the late Baron Thyssen which he gave to the Spanish nation in honour of his Spanish wife Carmen.
So it was that in a quiet moment after the end of Legal Tech in New York, and outside my schedule of meetings, I found myself walking 20 blocks up through Central Park to the Frick Collection.
It was a beautiful sunny morning and I was glad of my overcoat, woolly hat and gloves as the temperature was only a touch above 25 fahrenheit (-4C) and there was a sharp wind across the ice covered snow in the park. I had been to the Frick before about 12 years ago and it is one of my favourite museums so I was determined to see it again. It is contained in a magnificent Park Avenue building, lived in by Frick and his family and remodelled by him and his architect to house his truly gorgeous collection of paintings, sculpture and furniture and incorporating a garden made out of an old carriageway which had existed between the two parts of the house and which ran between East 70th and East 71st Street.
Henry Clay Frick was an industrialist who had an eye for some of the most sumptuous paintings of women. The Boucher room and the Fragonard rooms are outstanding and some of the other rooms contain pictures of beauties such as Elizabeth, Lady Taylor and Emma Hamilton, infamous for her affair with Admiral Lord Nelson before his untimely death at Trafalgar in 1805. Standing in front of these magnificent canvases I fell to thinking about the passage of time. After all, it is over 200 years since Nelson fell on the deck of the Victory and over 90 years since Frick himself died.
It is also 38 years since I first turned up at Allen & Overy in Cheapside to begin my articles, as training contracts were then called. The office was even then one of the premier firms in the City although I am not sure I recall the term Magic Circle being used. Lawyers had secretaries who typed all day on a selection of manual typewriters using carbon paper, and communications were all by telephone or by letter as fax machines (remember them?) had not yet been invented. Some of the senior secretaries operated with something called a Golf Ball typewriter and a select few had the first memory typewriter where the previous line of type appeared on a “ticker tape” in front of the typist rather like the information screens which run on a loop in modern tube trains.
In litigation, the White Book was the bible which contained the rules of the game. The game to be played was litigation and it was like Snakes and Ladders. You twisted and weaved through the small print of the Rules in order to outwit your opponents. If you were lucky (devious/clever) you could ambush them causing maximum embarassment as a result of which they slithered down the nearest snake while you climbed the closest ladder, for example, by revealing some telling point to them which tended to undermine their case from cards previously played close to your chest. Solicitors were in almost complete control and the courts had limited case management powers.
Two years later, in 1975:
- Jaws and The Rocky Horror Picture Show were premiered.
- The Sweeney and Jim’ll Fix It started on TV
- In Vietnam, Saigon fell.
- Gerald Ford was US President.
- General Franco died
- Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet and Charlize Theron were born.
- Britain voted 2 to 1 in favour of remaining in the Common Market.
- I qualified as a solicitor.
- The internet was scarcely a gleam in the eye of Tim Berners Lee!
How times have changed!
Today the Woolf reforms, born in 1998, are 12 years old. In the Noughties, more and more people sent emails and created documents which were never in paper but only existed electronically. As a result, it is practically inconceivable that a piece of litigation today does not carry with it the need to consider electronic documents. The courts have acquired significant case management powers.
Last October the new Practice Direction 31B came into force for most cases as the Rules Committee sought to catch up (for the time being) with the advance of technology. Lawyers must now consider, search for and disclose/inspect documents including Electronic Documents. Judge Simon Brown QC in the Earles case described a failure to know and apply the rules as “gross incompetence”. Now lawyers (or at least the better ones) understand that circumstances have changed and that they must plan how they intend to deal with electronic documents early on in the life of a case so that practical matters are agreed at the outset in the interests of furthering the overriding objective and their clients’ interests.
Now lawyers are concerned with the issues which arise from the practice and the concept of cloud computing [see Burying our heads in the clouds, 19th Oct, 2010]. They have to ask themselves how they will meet their disclosure obligations if their data is in the cloud. What happens if the court orders production of data by a specific date and the provider cannot meet the deadline? How will the court react? What happens if your provider subcontracts the storage of the data to a company based outside the jurisdiction of the court? That just did not happen when companies stored their data in metal filing cabinets, or, if it did, I never came across an instance!
At the risk of repetition, how times change!
One of the more interesting talks at Legal Tech was by Michael Rogers entitled “A look at the Law-2020.
Rogers is what is described as a futurist and I attended his talk because so much has happened since I started in the law and particularly in the last 5 to 10 years that I wanted to hear what he thought might happen in the next 10 years.
Some of his ideas were truly startling. They included:
- Law and lawyers should not assume that their profession is immune from change. Think used cars and the arrival of eBay.
- Since 2008, 15,000 legal jobs have been lost in the US.
- Technology will become smaller and more personal. Wireless will be everywhere and spectacles (goggles have already been tested) will enable us to recognise a person as he/she approaches, providing information about the person to enable you to speak to him/her about relevant matters even if you initially failed to recognise the person or to remember what he/she did.
- Intelligent systems will increase. Example is translation software which to a small degree is already with us.
- Software engineers will be more important than lawyers. As data increases, the organisation and management of it will become more important and the need for clever programmers will rise.
- A system of secure ID will become available because, at present, “on the internet no one knows you are a dog!”
- Open Source legal documents will replace the bespoke variety. Start ups already use them.
- Virtual law practices will be widespread. Telepresence will be perfected.
- Governments will have to act to deal with the rise of organised internet crime. Internet access will be crucial. Cyber war is simple: just turn off the internet and a whole country can be immobilised.
His closing message was along the lines of the need to strike a balance between the real world and the virtual but that we would do well to take care not to lose the values of the past while building the new world.
We have come a long way since Emma Hamilton and Elizabeth, Lady Taylor! It has often seemed like a Dance to the Music of Time – Poussin’s painting being the inspiration both for my title and for and Anthony Powell’s 12 volume novel cycle of the same name.
And whilst on the subject of tenuous links, Josephine Tey is an author whose works are not that well known but who is remembered most for her book, The Daughter of Time. Not about time travel, it is an entertaining account of her view that King Richard III was not the monstrous child murderer he is always made out to be. She argues that history is written by the victors and that after failing, according to Shakespeare, to find a horse on the field of Bosworth in August 1485, Richard was subsequently excoriated for murdering the Princes in the Tower (for which she argues there is little evidence). History was (re)written by the victorious Tudors whose claim to the throne depended to some extent on the Princes not being there to argue that their claim to the throne was better than that of Henry VII.
The Daughter of Time is a misquotation of Francis Bacon who actually said, “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” Francis Bacon is also credited with the saying: “Knowledge is Power” which seems to me to be an appropriate way to conclude these musings. It is what e-disclosure is all about. Know your data and how to manage it and you can achieve the high moral ground, and serve your clients’ interests well at the same time.
So there’s no need to be content to dance to the music of time – the message must be that if you get it right by planning ahead, you will soon see that knowledge is power!