THE PONY EXPRESS

11:35 PM: Our Miami Criminal Defense Attorney (MCDA) leans over in bed and picks up his iPhone and says "Siri wake me up tomorrow at 6:30." Siri responds affirmatively. 
6:20 AM. MCDA's coffee maker, having been programed, grinds a set of beans and begins to brew coffee. 
6:30 AM. MCDA wakes up. He reaches over to his iPad on the night stand and checks his email account, scans his Twitter feed and looks at the headiness  of the NY Times on line. 
7:45 AM: MCDA's GPS in his car alerts him to an accident on US 1 and recommends he turn off US 1 and proposes a route through Coconut Grove to I-95 and the courthouse. 
8:33 AM. Once at the courthouse parking lot, MCDA reviews his daily calendar on his iPad and then looks through some legal papers that have been scanned into a file. He logs on to Google and looks at a client's file he has stored in Google docs. 
9:27 AM. After an easy morning in court, MCDA heads to his office. On the way he uses the bluetooth cellphone connection  in his car to return a few client phone calls. 
10:11 AM. MCDA arrives at his office and picks up the mail. 
There are a stack of twenty two court notices that have been mailed to his office. 21st century technology stopped dead in its tracks courtesy of the Miami Dade Clerk's Office. 


Welcome to the practice of criminal law in Miami circa 2012. When it comes to schedules and calendars and notices from the clerk, there is not much difference in the practice of law today from 1982- thirty years ago. 
Thirty years ago you didn't have a cell phone or a beeper. Nothing about your TV was flat if it was working. The word "Internet" didn't exist in most dictionaries (neither did Al Gore ). If you were sick you didn't get a CAT scan. An X-ray sufficed. Look how far we've come (Newt Gingrich excepted). 
But what happened to the Dade County Clerk's Office? It's as if some evil villain from Star Trek has frozen the clerk's office just as it was in 1982.
How many of you would sign up to receive emails from the clerk's office as an official court notice? How much money would that save in paper and postage? What if you could add your client's email address as well? But who's going to explain to Harvey Ruvin what an email is? 


Here's a comment we received the other day:
Anonymous said...

E-filing? What's that? Oh yeah, that's the thing they do in Broward.
What Brown should be ashamed of is that court notices for criminal are actually MAILED to attorneys. Mailed- like they did in the 1940's
Here's an idea- and stick with me on this. The county buys a Commodore 64 computer off of ebay. They buy a copy of Windows 95 and a copy of Adobe 7.0 from 2006. They hire a computer programmer from any of about 36 technical schools in Miami or even from a local university. The computer programmer programs the above mentioned computer to print the court notice to electronic format. They then take the electronic format notice and they send it via email to the attorney. Voila, no more paper notices being mailed out by the thousands.
My receptionist is 17 and even she asks why the court mails a court notice to me for a date I've known about for three months. Or the infamous Notice of Cancellation postcard which usually arrives after the cancelled date. There's more taxpayer paid technology in the Marlins' stadium locker rooms than there is at the Clerk's office.
Okay, I'm out. Judge Brown and I gotta go buy some carbon paper at Zayre's.

Rumpole notes: There's more truth to that comment than humor.

See You In Court.