ETHICALLY SPEAKING | BY CHARLES SLANINA, ESQUIRE
Wellness and the Challenges of Change
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Changes, even in the course of my career, have been dramatic. While I was still in law school and working as a summer law clerk, it was a paper world. The postman delivered the “snail” mail twice a day. Attorneys enjoyed the luxury of knowing that they had a grace period of at least a few days before a response was expected. That delay provided an opportunity for a more thoughtful response and sometimes a chance to cool off before sending a rash reply in anger. Today, it is too easy to send a regrettable reply in the heat of the moment in the time it takes to hit “send.” More pressing, but local, correspondence was sent by court “runners.” There was a small army of mostly high school students, usually boys from Salesianum and girls from Padua, who would arrive every afternoon when they finished school to begin their rounds, picking 16
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e are practicing law in challenging times. The changes brought on by the pandemic have been significant. We had to adapt to closed offices and closed courts and the learning curve of using Zoom as an alternative. But the cost in lives, financial hardships, isolation, and anxiety should not be discounted. However, the practice of law always evolves — albeit in normal times at a much slower pace. As a profession, we have always coped. I expect, we always will.
up mail and pleadings to be delivered or picked up and returned, throughout downtown Wilmington. Those papers were generated in a way that would likely seem primitive to many readers of this column. Home and office computers were nonexistent. I was working for the State of Delaware when secretaries received the first IBM Selectrics, mammoth typewriters that occupied much of the desk top. Instead of individual keys striking the page, there was a single ball with typeset around the outside. Each keystroke caused the ball to strike the page at a different angle with the selected character hitting the page. There was no monitor. Instead, there was a small, singlespace window appearing above the keyboard with a digital display of the last few words that were typed. Amazing at the time, the Selectric had several pages of memory, and copies of the document could be retyped. Large firms had a copy center, sometimes with a full-time operator. Typically, copies would be made for the client, the file, the correspondence file, and the “tickler” system. A lot of trees were destroyed in the process. However, when it came time to answer discovery or produce a copy of your file, it was all there on the shelf. There was not a need to search the cloud, emails, and texts. Document production involved cardboard cartons and trucks instead of drop boxes and thumb drives.
