This is an historic moment for the legal profession. The nearly 1 billion people online world wide- along with their collective wisdom, networks, online identities, and sheer computing power- are, in the words of Business Week’s report on The Future of Technology from June ’05, rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power.” There’s a fundamental shift in power happening, “says Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, “Everywhere, people are getting together, and using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they are involved in.” And with your help, the legal profession can reinvent itself by forming a virtual bar association to serve the needs of the emerging networked society.

There have been many efforts in the past 20 years by the profession to understand and incorporate technology into the practice of law. In 1985, the ABA Economics of Law Practice Section received a proposal to create a professional association for Computing and Information Technology in the Law. It stated, “There is a growing need for the legal profession itself to facilitate the application of information systems technology to the practice of law.” Over 2000 user group members and 15 national committees coordinated work on these efforts.

By 1987, the ABA annual Techshow was founded and has been running for three days every spring since then. The ABA Law Practice Management Section’s eLawyering task force has been in existence for the last 5 yrs and done a fabulous job of promoting best practices and running training and awareness campaigns. By 1990, the Business Law and Science and Technology sections of the ABA had begun addressing the needs of businesses wanting to do business online with their early EDI- electronic data interchange- and digital signature projects. Today, both sections have hundreds of lawyers actively working in bar committees to develop the law of cyberspace.

All this activity occurred before the mass adoption of secure collaboration technologies. And the number of lawyers online today is increasing exponentially because of an emerging generation of net technologies. The legal profession has the opportunity to collaborate across cultures, across bar associations, to teach each other how to practice law ethically in cyberspace, and to collaborate to develop harmonized rules of law in cyberspace and define the new terms of engagement for a networked society. As the representative of the legal profession in cyberspace, Internetbar.org is the place for lawyers and all those who are interested in law reform to meet and greet each other in the online global village for cyberspace law reform and training.

Each member of Internetbar.org brings a special set of skills to our effort- some of you have the technology skills and willingness to train others- others have a special interest in promoting ethical behavior and social responsibility with a special focus to find peaceful ways to reach consensus across cultures- others bring specialized knowledge and leadership roles in the efforts to harmonize e-commerce and private international laws- and others want to reach across the digital divide to make certain that all cultures will benefit in a networked society. Most important, everyone is willing to start a virtual bar association for all cultures and to begin to define and reinvent the legal profession for today’s world.

Thank you for the opportunity to work together with all of you to bring this idea to life!