The ultimate digital townhall has arrived, and with it, have we seen the flicker of opportunity for pure democracy?  A recent experience tells me the time has arrived for a bold politician to consider offering an experiment in such democracy.

A few evenings ago, my home phone rang.  When I answered, a robodialer asked if I'd like to join the Town Hall being conducted my my local Congresswoman, where her team was available to answer questions on the Affordable Care Act and the insurance process.  I pressed the assigned key and was dropped into a conversation in which other constituents were queing up, asking questions, and getting answers, all shared with everyone one the line. 

I want to be clear - I had not signed up or indicated interest in any way.  I have not yet been able to confirm, but it appeared that the robodialer called the home of every voter in the district and the call had no limit on participants.  Kudos to my Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, because her assembled team answered a myriad of diverse questions during a call that went on for a long time.

During the course of the call, one of the staffers would occasionally ask a survey question and ask the constituents to enter their vote through their phone keypad.  This is when my enthusiasm really picked up. 

When I first moved to New York City many years ago, before email and the web, I wondered if the sheer proximity of an entire constituency would make it possible to experiment with truly representative government, for an elected official to actually accumulate the opinion of the people on an issue and vote according to the majority. At the time, I envisioned ballots dropped in stacks at buildings, or delivered with the newspaper, or some equivalent.  The logistics of collecting the returns were achievable but labor intensive.

In the mechanics of this digital town hall call, were the mechanisms for achieving such an experiment. The robodialer combined with Q&A for difficult details and a phone survey would make it possible to get meaningful and representative constituent input.  And, this can be done asynchronously, so no need to get all constituents at the same moment.

When I speak about LegalTech innovation, this is the sort of thing I'm envisioning.  With all due respect to those who are offering enhanced document management applications for the legal profession, that's not what I'm seeking.  Technology offers the opportunity to implement the law as we know it in completely new ways, or to create wholly new legal paradigms.  Here is the opportunity for a bold politician to offer to represent his or her constituents in the most pure form of democracy.  Any takers? 

It's not news that our society is divided into technological haves and have-nots.  Much has been written about the advantages lost or gained - education, professional, and social - based upon the primacy and recency of one's technology.  Recently, I've become increasingly attuned to another place where technological caste matters -- legal standards. 

It's been clear to me for quite some time that the lawyer who resonates with technology can do more successful and faster legal research; propound vastly superior discovery requests; and produce substantially more incisive disclosures.  It's now becoming increasingly clear to me that the law itself is being skewed by those of us who live to keep up with the next big thing in technology.  Debates among lawyers rage in my email inbox about the differences in things like encryption technologies and metadata standards, with lots of cool techie references to things like ISO, NIST, Diffie, OASIS, and XACML.  

In the meantime, I was on the the Social Security Administration website the other day and they wanted me to use an eight digit alphanumeric password (case insensitive, no special characters) to upload W2 and other sensitive tax information.  My bank's brokerage affiliate is using the same outdated and readily hackable password technology  I still see commercial and bar association websites seeking personal and financial information without indicating that they're using SSL or some other baseline method of securing the information.  I still get requests from security professionals to email my Social Security Number.  If you're not particularly technical, trust me, none of these are good things.

The distance between these two realities has got me thinking about all the places that these two technological castes will be competing to set legal standards.  For example, does a "time is of the essence clause" apply the perception of time of a blackberry owner or a person without a laptop?   

As the new administration provides the first coordinated national focus on technology, I'd like to add this to the list.  Perhaps the new national CTO (yet to be appointed) could work with the American Bar Association and other leaders to identify a rational strategy for standards setting in such a technologically bifurcated society.

Train wreck caused by text messaging?  Multiple news reports have raised the possibility that the conductor of a Los Angeles train was sending text messages just before the train crashed and many were killed.  The questions under investigation are whether this is true and whether the conductor was distracted by it when he should have seen red light signals indicating the hazard ahead. 

This is the saddest outcome of an issue I, and others, have been raising for years.  The use of technology for non-work activities has pervaded the work environment to the extent that it is impacting work performance.  The obvious problem is lost revenue and reduced profits to the employer, but sometimes it correlates to increased liability.  If true in this case, it means lost lives. 

If the shopclerk with an mp3 player or cellphone in the ear is too distracted to answer  questions accurately or make correct change, what makes me think my car mechanic, stock broker, or doctor's lab technician isn't?  In 2006, eDiscovery companies were estimating that one quarter to one third of all emails flowing through a corporation were personal email. At the time, I wrote about the thousands of football and fantasy football gambling emails that had passed through Enron.  I also wrote about the dirty jokes, hook ups, and other sex emails there.

It's getting technically easier to discover that people aren't really working when they claim to be. This summer before lecturing at a state bar convenion, I stood in the back of the large hall and observed what people were doing.  I explained the ways I could prove that they had been using their  laptops, blackberries, and iphones to shop on the web, play video poker, and text friends and family.  I explained how, In the not-to-distant-future, these activities will probably void the professional certification credit they thought they were earning by being present but not paying attention.

This week's train wreck brings more attention to the debate about just how much people's attention is diverted and what the consequences can be.  At a New York panel discussion last fall, a group of senior financial industry compliance managers uniformly said they weren't concerned about personal web, email, and phone use at work.  Perhaps they ought to be.