On a chilly January afternoon, Chip Molster and I chatted with Jack W. “JB” Burtch about how he has embraced the use of technology in his law practice over the past forty-two years. JB’s office overlooks the old federal courthouse on Main Street in Richmond. It is cozy and neat, missing the stacks of files and papers usually strewn around the floor, tables, and chairs of most lawyers. Ironically, as members of the Virginia State Bar’s Special Committee on Technology and the Practice of Law, Chip and I arrived in JB’s office armed with the newest in pencil, legal pad, and cassette tape recorder.

Upon his graduation from Vanderbilt Law School, JB Burtch joined the Labor and Employment team at the Richmond office of Hunton & Williams LLP in 1973. In 1980, he left to start McSweeney, Burtch & Crump PC, where he remained for twenty years. Finally, in 2001, he co-founded Macaulay & Burtch PC, which currently has three lobbyists in addition to JB and his son, Douglas, who serves as the firm’s managing partner. Both JB and Douglas focus their practices on labor and employment, and litigation.

In Burtch’s long legal career, he has had the unique opportunity to practice in small, medium, and (then) large law firms. Also, as a member of the VSB Senior Lawyers’ Conference, he has seen many changes in the practice of law and the information age, and practitioners’ use of technological tools available to meet those challenges.

Who is more technology savvy, you or Douglas?

Me. Because I like it, I think it’s an adventure. I like to know what you can do. I just discovered this thing with my Evernote subscription. It’s called Scannable; it’s an app on my iPhone. You can scan a document—well basically you’re taking a picture of it—but it makes it into a PDF, so you can file it with everything else. You can take a picture of anything. You can clip articles from the web and create folders and files within folders and it’s just—it’s your personal library. You can put work materials in there. I teach some courses and give some programs, and I just put everything I do except law files in there. So I’ve got my notes from last year if I have to do a program again. It’s cloud-based. Our law firm went to the cloud last year.

What did you have before that?

We had a server here in the office. It’s easier to use the cloud-based system.

I’ve talked to our IT person about the cloud but she has security concerns.

Everybody has security concerns. Here’s the deal. How secure were our offices before computers? I guess the only distinction is this… before someone had to get in your door as opposed to having to do it from 100 miles away. Everybody wants to talk about security. What are you going to do? It’s as secure as your server is. And if your server burns down, you’re toast. But now our data is backed up in a number of different places. You have to balance the security against the convenience of how we are going to have to do business… because remember, we’re not just competing with lawyers, we’re competing with accountants and consultants and others.

If we want to make the startup costs for our profession much higher than everybody else’s because of our security and confidentiality concerns… I’m not minimizing the need, but at some point you’ve got to use the technology. So for me the point is really simple. The profession is changing. It is by necessity becoming more efficient because that’s what our clients are demanding. If we don’t use the tools of efficiency, then we’re behind.

What are your thoughts on the ethical obligations as a lawyer with respect to the use of technology and security?

We had a big go-around before we signed up on the cloud. We had our list of demands; the VSB said we had to have these things before we could go to the cloud. We negotiated all of those points with the vendor, so that was very important. I think it is important to work with a vendor that is used to working with lawyers and understands their unique concerns.

How has technology undermined the practice of law?

I still think that the practice of law is a learned profession. We have to think about things and strategize and consider alternatives. What happens now is that your phone will ring and you’ll be on a conference call that you didn’t know was a conference call. The client says he’s going to e-mail you an agreement right then and expects you to read it while you are talking on the phone and provide a legal opinion.

There’s no room for thinking or reflecting, or just contemplating what the problem really is. You become reactive. The pace has increased tremendously. Clients expect an immediate response. In the old days, you might send a draft to a client and not hear back for two days. Now, the client reacts immediately along with a number of other people who have been copied. It’s a quality-of-thought issue.

Are you moving to a paperless office?

In our engagement letter, we let the client know that we are not going to maintain a paper file. The file will be in digital form. I’m trying to get as paperless as I can be. We’re not totally paperless, but I’m trying to get as paperless as possible. I scan my notes and then I have a pile for the shredder and everything goes immediately in the shredder. If you send me a letter, I scan the letter and then I shred it.

In terms of searchability, I do not have sophisticated litigation searchable programs yet. I use Adobe to make PDFs searchable, but that’s as far as I can go.

What should we be mindful of—what about people going on vacation or not reading email after a certain time?

I do it. I go places. I make it a habit of going on vacation to places where I cannot get email. Two years ago, I was in Cuba for two weeks. Or I’ve gone to the middle of Africa. You’ve got to. That is a real problem, because in terms of lawyer health and well-being, speaking as the past president of Lawyers Helping Lawyers, you can’t be under stress 24/7 or you’re going to get sick—or do the stupid things we do to relieve stress.

At the same time, you have to be available for night or weekend emails and calls. To some extent, that’s what we’ve signed up for when we decided to be lawyers. I had a client call me this week who had come home from a party. It was midnight and he got this horrible piece of mail and he called me. I was glad he called me—he had a big problem and he turned to me to help him. That’s what I’m here for.

Do you think that technology has raised or lowered the bar to entry for the solo practitioner?

It’s lowered the bar to entry. There is a cost, but there are kind of plateaus. If you get your Mac (if I were a solo I’d be a Mac lawyer, not a PC lawyer), you get your iPad, you get your iPhone, you become a member of the Virginia State Bar—which gives you Fastcase—and get a good Adobe program. You can put together a package that will work for not a whole lot of money.

Any last thoughts, JB?

There are two points that I’d like to make. One is that I try to hire assistants who are in college or who just graduated from college because I learn from them. I learn technology from college students. Meanwhile, they are thinking about law school. There’s this mutual mentoring concept. They teach me the stuff that I don’t know.

The other thing is that if you are a senior lawyer—I’m a senior lawyer and former head of the VSB Senior Lawyer Conference—if you want to shorten your career, don’t learn anything about technology. In a law firm I’m very familiar with, there were some lawyers that were totally self-sufficient with their tools, but then there was a lawyer of my vintage who still had his own personal secretary and his own personal legal assistant. That’s a cost structure that you can’t sustain today. So if you want to take yourself out of the game, be ignorant of new technology.