People have stopped talking to each other.

I am a lawyer in Salt Lake City. A large share of what people pay me to do, I have come to realize, is talk to someone they could have talked to themselves.

The neighbor. The ex. The landlord. The brother who has the truck. The person who posted the thing. In most of these disputes there was a point, early on, where a phone call would have ended it. Nobody made the call. They texted, and the text was misread. They posted, and the post got an audience. They wrote a long e-mail at midnight, and the reply came from a lawyer, or from a court form, or from nobody at all. By the time the file reaches my desk the two people have not spoken in months, and the only thing left to do is have strangers speak for them, at a cost neither of them would have chosen if anyone had told them the price up front.

This site is about that. Not the law. The habit underneath it.

People have stopped talking to each other

I do not mean they have stopped communicating. They communicate more than any humans in history. What they have stopped doing is the specific thing where you hear the other person's voice, in real time, and have to respond to it before you have had a chance to draft. That thing is uncomfortable. It has always been uncomfortable. It is also where most problems between two people get solved, because it is the only medium in which you cannot pretend the other person is not there.

Every newer medium removes a little more of the other person. A letter removed the voice but kept the effort. E-mail removed the effort. Texting removed the sentences. Social media removed the privacy and added a crowd, and a crowd changes what people are willing to say. Then the phone in your pocket made all of these available at every moment, which meant the moment of greatest anger was always also a moment of maximum reach.

What was left behind is a generation of adults, my age included, who find a phone call slightly alarming. Who let it ring. Who text "can't talk, what's up" and then handle a serious matter in a medium designed for confirming dinner plans.

The internet made it worse on purpose

The platforms are not neutral. They are built to keep you posting, and the surest way to keep someone posting is to make them angry in public. A disagreement between two people used to have two participants. Now it has two participants and a comment section, and the comment section rewards whichever of the two is meaner. Neighbors who have lived next to each other for a decade end up in court over a fence because the argument about the fence happened on a community Facebook page instead of over the fence.

This has also made people litigious in a particular way. Not litigious like a business that sues to enforce a contract. Litigious like a person who has been told by a hundred strangers online that what happened to them is outrageous and that someone should pay. The courts are full of these cases. Small claims, protective orders, stalking injunctions, harassment complaints. Many of them are real. A growing number are two people who needed a conversation and got a docket number instead.

Now the machines are talking, and we are not

The newest development is the one that made me start writing this down. People now arrive with a legal theory that a chatbot gave them. It is fluent, confident, formatted with headings, and wrong. Sometimes it cites a case that does not exist. More often it cites a real case for something the case does not say. The person has read it several times and believes it, because it reads like something a lawyer would write, and they have paid me to tell them why it will not work, which I do, and which they do not always accept, because the machine was so sure.

Judges are seeing the same thing from people representing themselves. Court staff are seeing it at the filing counter. The effect is that a real part of the legal system's time now goes to explaining, patiently, to a person who has been told otherwise by software, what the law actually is. Nobody budgeted for that.

And then there is the e-mail. I have received e-mails I am fairly sure were written by a machine, and I have caught myself about to have a machine write the reply. At that point two people who could have settled something in a four-minute call are paying for two computers to exchange paragraphs on their behalf, and neither person has had to say a single hard thing out loud. That is the final version of not talking to each other, and it gets called efficiency.

The phone call is the actual technology

I keep coming back to the same observation, and it is not a sophisticated one. When two people who are angry at each other get on the phone, something happens in the first thirty seconds that does not happen in any other medium. They hear that the other one is a person. Not a screen name. Not a paragraph. A voice that is tired, or scared, or embarrassed, or just as unsure as they are. Most of the heat goes out of it right there. Not all of it, and not always. But most, and usually.

Almost everything I do for a living is a substitute for that thirty seconds. Demand letters, motions, hearings, settlement conferences. They are expensive, slow, formal ways of putting two people in the same room after they have refused to be in the same room. Sometimes that is necessary. Someone is dangerous, or dishonest, or the money is large enough that the formality is worth it. But in the ordinary run of human disputes, the ones about fences and text messages and who said what at the party, the substitute is worse than the thing it replaces, and it costs a hundred times more.

What I am asking

Nothing large. Before you post about a person, call the person. Before you send the long e-mail, call. Before you fill out the form on the court's website, ask yourself whether you have ever, once, said out loud to this person what you want them to stop doing. If the honest answer is no, and you are not afraid of them, make the call. It will be two minutes of discomfort. The alternative is months.

If you are afraid of them, do not call. That is what the court is for, and I will be the first to tell you to use it.

Everything else on this site is a note on the same idea. I add to it when I see something worth writing down. There is no comment section, for reasons that should be obvious by now.