New York is the East Coast dead ethics twin of California, one of the most damaging ethics corrupters among the states, and a constant anchor on any efforts to keep the culture from rotting. With one unethical mayor elected in New York City after another, the depressing Andrew Cuomo to Kathy Hochul hand-off in the State House, the corrupt and irresponsible state legislature, two habitually unethical U.S. Senators and the state’s determination to defy U.S. immigration law and the U.S. Constitution (I don’t have time to get into the rest, like the New York Times, Broadway and the Yankees), the entire Empire State has become on ongoing bad ethics pageant. Thus it is a shock, a relief, and a glimmer of hope that the it finally has generated a significant positive ethics development that should prompt the rest of the country to follow its lead.

This month, New York became the first U.S. state to require its attorneys to take continuing legal education courses in cybersecurity, privacy and data protection. The New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Technology and the Legal Profession stated in its 2020 report that a specific requirement was needed over a general one because of the importance of protecting client and law firm data. Lawyers everywhere have been dangerously tardy in becoming sufficiently competent in the technology they must use every day to protect their clients’ confidences and avoid other damaging tech malfunctions and gaffes. (Judges are even worse.) The problem is magnified by the speed with which technology is evolving: there are new developments constantly, and only a relative few lawyers have caught up with the last set of changes.

I urge the attendees to my legal ethics seminars to resolve to take at least a week off every year to study legal practice technology and become proficient enough to justify the trust of clients. (There is no evidence that any lawyer has ever followed that advice.) Tech botches are epidemic. Yet most of the state bar associations have refused to treat the problem with any urgency. The ABA proposed a mild change to the comments in its Model Rules of Professional Conduct that make technology competence a requirement of legal competence. New York adopted the change in 2015; seven years later, many states are still debating it. As a result of the persistent laissez faire attitude of the profession, even simple precautions escape the consciousness of too many lawyers. How hard is it to figure out that one should not leave confidential client information on your cell phone?

The New York requirement, as encouraging as it is, still is ridiculously inadequate. All attorneys must complete just one hour of training every two years in either the ethical obligations surrounding cybersecurity, privacy and data protection, or in the technological and practice-related aspects of protecting data and client communications. Believe me, a single hour is almost nothing in a continuing legal education training session; most instructors will waste half of that in irrelevant anecdotes. One hour every two years is ridiculous, especially since there are frequently enough developments in a single year to create serious perils for the typical tech-ignorant attorney.

But it’s a start. And the other states are still acting as if computers are some newfangled fad that those kids are obsessed with.

Good for New York.

I wonder when I’ll have the opportunity to write that again….

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Source: LawSites.