Online Dispute Resolution. Finding Ways to Be Lawyers in Today's World.

While no industry seems to have been spared the impact brought on by the crisis, legal professionals have a particularly hard time coping with pandemic-related challenges. Justice/legal practice remains in constant flux. Lawyers will be ‘more in demand than ever’ with online court, says Sir Geoffrey Vos. Giving the annual Tom Sargant Memorial Lecture, November 4, 2021, Vos said a ‘non-digital system is no longer aligned with everything else in society’ and argued the judiciary to embrance ‘the inevitable digitisation of society’.

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/lawyers-will-be-more-in-demand-than-ever-with-online-courts-says-vos/5110434.article

The central premise of this news is that the twenty-first century presents new challenges to the judiciary/lawyers – challenges which may sometimes leave existing law and procedure in a kind of limbo. Human cloning, computer data mining, computer-generated judicial profiles, online dispute resolution etc on one side, and the era of globalization, digitalization, terror, human rights protection catastrophe, poverty, climate change, new diseases (Covid-19 etc) on another side, are obvious examples.

Legal work — and litigation especially — requires a great deal of mental stamina, whether it’s related to meeting unforgiving deadlines, juggling high-pressure demands from clients, preparing for an intensive, high-stakes trial, or just keeping up with the fast-paced environment of busy firms and growing practices. When most of one’s work is accompanied by a significant mental strain, there will always be a risk of negative impacts on their mental health. The pandemic has only complicated efforts within courts and Law Firms to address these issues, and it is important to keep that in mind when evaluating the efficacy of current treatment and support methods.

Scholars` pragmatism, with its emphasis on “what works,” might fill the legal void when new challenges arise. But precisely what are the general solutions available to the lawmaker, the judiciary, legal firms? Could we offer the receipt, suitable for any nation, any state?

The topic is itself moving target. Over the next decades, judges/lawyers will be required to apply laws to radically different circumstances and in radically new environment as a result of a new era we can only begin to imagine. Global threats, political, environmental, epidemic, will put immense stress on the judiciary and advocates/lawyers. The unpredictable and unprecedented nature of such developments makes all analyses highly provisional, but also necessary, and as it turned out, highly stimulating. It’s a matter of the rule of law, to fulfill our role of stewardship by insulating justice principles against the challenges of the future.

“Justice is an art..” - said Prof. Louis B. Schwartz in the owen J. Roberts Memorial Lecture, given at the University of Pennsylvania on October 9, 1986. And we agree. Justice/lawyering is a symbol, an art, an energy.

Resolving a legal case a judge/lawyer attracts and sends energy.

He/ she applies and interprets the legal norms. It is common knowledge that the law is a linguistic proposition that has to be interpreted. Each judge/lawyer is always obliged to make a judgment, to find the solution, even in cases of vagueness, ambiguity, imprecision, incompleteness of the law. Interpretation is a complex and dialectical system. The resolution of a legal dispute is something of procedural, which is based conceptually on three distinct steps: recognition of problem, research of rule to apply, effective application of a norm to issue.

Interpeting and applying the legal norms, the judge/lawyer thinks and applies the discretion/creativity. Judicial discretion/legal creativity consist of judge/lawyer’s thoughts. So, what is his/her thought and how does it connect up with justice/good lawyering?

Discretio est discernere per legem quid sit justum, - Latin wisdom says.

Applying the quantum mechanics, Peter Baksa confirms that our brain is comprised of a tight network of nerve cells, all interacting with one another and generating an overall electrical field. Our brain waves are simply the superposition of the multitude of electrical states being formed by our nervous system. Not only our brain, but our entire body has an electric field. Anywhere there's anerve cell, there's electricity. It's just concentrated the greatest around our head because that's where the bulk of our nerve cells are. So, nothing mysterious about that part.

Being an electric field, all those overlying electric wave patterns that comprise our brain waves are governed by the same equations governing the electromagnetic spectrum, light, particles and everything else in the universe. The light seen coming from a star and the energy of our mind are one and the same type.

Our thoughts are formed in this electric field. Judge/lawyer’s thoughts are formed in this electric field. The measurable perturbations and disturbances in the brain's overall electric field are our actual thoughts racing through our mind. The thoughts a judge/lawyer is thinking of, the words his mind is processing, are all electrical impulses.

Dr. Emoto’s studies reveal the power of positive intention.

https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/mindfulness-matters-dr-emoto-studies-reveal-power-of-positive-emotion-012914

“If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us.”– from the movie 2004, “What the Bleep Do We Know?”

The truth is that we the leading Italian (Sicilian) Law Frim, in fact, are showing an increased dedication to our team/collaborators’s mental well-being. The treatment we offer consisits of: Mindfulness Approach, Series on Mindfulness, Golden Hours. As challenges related to the pandemic can be avoided more strategically, the real value of our treatment of mental health conditions should begin to come into focus.

Perhaps one thing the pandemic has taught us is that we need to reimagine what our workdays look like, regardless of our industry. Thoughts are energy, the same as everything else.

That means they are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's wave equations as well. All those same weird things about quantum mechanics that describe how an electron or photon behave, apply to a judge\lawmaker, to a lawyer, to anyone and to their thoughts as well. The Particle-Wave Duality, the Uncertainty Principle, and of course, Entanglement.

This implies that, like any other set of particles or source of energy, a judge/lawyer is entangled with everything he/she has ever encountered in hearings, in judiciary and the rest of the universe through the zero point field. We can think, we are conscious. As such, a judge/lawyer can choose which of the possibilities before him/her to collapse his/her wave function into. But more than that, a judge can thus affect that as well and influence the randomness, just as it can influence him/her.

Since a judge/lawyer is conscious, he/she can choose what part of the randomness around him/her to be affected by, and how he/she in turn would like to affect it. It is through the property of entanglement that a judge/lawyer can affect change. Our minds are transceivers, able to receive and send signals into the "quantum soup" of the zero point field by way of the highly coherent frequencies of our thoughts.

The higher the frequency of lawyer\judge's thought/brain wave, the higher his/her consciousness. The level of his/her consciousness is what makes lawyer\judge's reality what it is and what it will continue to be..

The level of his/her consciousness (the frequency of lawyer\judge's thought\brain wave) is what makes his\her reality.

Peter Baksa writes: if you are seeking change, set an intention, declare a path (align your behaviors with your desire), then detach and allow the universe to handle the details. What is why the judge/lawyer’s thought is very important for achieving justice/good lawyering.

Ante omnia, a lawyer\judge has to pay attention to his/her thoughts as a part of judicial discretion\legal creativity centered on the theory of the separation of powers, on the Rule of Law and other legal foundations.

Just the things we pay attention to are alive and the things that do not receive our attention die. It is applicable to everything, to every situation, to every person. It is applicable to Justice, to trial, to a judge\lawmaker, to a lawyer/advocate. It can be explained by quantum mechanics.

The crux of the Law of Attraction is that whatever a person focuses on will be brought into that person's existence, because the thought becomes directed energy which attracts those things upon which the mind is focused. If a judge\ lawmaker focuses on the injustice, more injustice will come. If a judge\lawmaker focuses on justice, more just decisions (the rules of law) will come. If a lawyer thinks about good lawyering, he brings about it. In short, "What you think about you bring about." (Bob Proctor).

Attention is an important moment in every trial, in every case, in every legal issue because it creates a language inside a judge/lawyer, which allows him/her to listen to what surrounds him/her, to send\attract the energy. Language which we have already defined as discretion, as creativity. Discretion/creativity is a language of energy. One becomes capable of listening, one becomes receptive. This is the way to nourish the interiority of anyone. And if a trial seems unjust, it is a judge who does not know how to achieve justice, and the secret that it contains. Discretio est discernere per legem quid sit justum- if the reader remembers.
In the chapter on attention in the Principles of Psychology, William James writes what on a first reflection might sound rather plausible : “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.” That is, according to James here, justice judge achieves is justice receives his attention or interests him and therefore becomes, is, or remains the object of his experience. In James’s words : “Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground – intelligible perspective, in a word.” If, as James would have it, to experience always involves attention or interest that makes discernment possible, then it seems that to experience amounts to being awake. For exercising just discretion\creativity, a judge\lawyer has to be awake.

Here Awakening is not a metaphor: basic wakefulness is the effects of Buddhist meditation practices.

Mindfulness meditation has a long-standing history in Eastern practices that has received considerable public interest in recent decades. These practices have become a topic of widespread interest in both science and medicine, also. Mindfulness-based stress reduction can often help people address stress, chronic pain, cancer, anxiety, depression, and other chronic issues.

Mindfulness-based injustice reduction can often help judges\lawmakers address injustice.

Awakening is a complex problem. We base on well-established ideas from the complexity theory. The study published in Physical Review Research is potentially applicable to humans (to a judge\lawmaker). The research team studied the brain signals produced by 13 fruit flies both when they were awake and when they were anesthetized. They then analyzed the signals to see how complex they were. “We found the statistical complexity to be larger when a fly is awake than when the same fly is anesthetized,” the team said. This is a major problem in justice/lawyering, where it is crucial to differentiate between sleeping judges/lawyers and those who are awake. “The study is significant because it highlights an objective way to measure conscious arousal, based on well-established ideas from complexity theory,” the team said. “It is potentially applicable to humans — and it reflects a growing interest in new theories of consciousness that are experimentally testable.”

This is especially important in the study of judiciary, judicial and law changes, and lawmakers\lawyers, where complexity theory can offer insights into how courts\lawyers become more just (fair), accessible, sustainable, adaptive, and innovative.

May there be this awareness when a lawyer\judge uses his thoughts! "Those who act with approximation also get used to speaking with approximation, and coarse, imprecise and slovenly speaking also involves thinking in this indeterminacy...Being precise and clear in one's thoughts is the pledge of spiritual freedom".

It is not given to us to predict

How will our word respond,

And sympathy is given to us,

How grace is given to us ..

The COVID-19 pandemic is requiring lawyers\judges to make profoundly important legal rsolutions - decisions which often have immediate impacts on our rights and freedoms and which will fundamentally shape our society and economy for years to come. Robust scrutiny and debate will improve the quality of these decisions and strengthen public trust in them.

We need Mindfulness, Discretion/Creativity to step justice/lawyering up, not shut it down, in the pandemic.

We the leading Italian (Sicilian) Law Firm calls on judges, lawyers, collaborators, professionals, clients to courage to change. We are a law firm of the future. For us the future is now. However, it can be understood only by those who are ready to break away from the past, we need collaborators who look ahead and are open to the future that is calling us.