Sunsetting a Committee | Advocacy in the 21st Century

January 29, 2026

The Committee on Advocacy in the 21^st Century began as a Task Force created by the College when COVID descended on North America.  Remote hearings became the new norm for all courts and litigants, and counsel across the US and Canada struggled to provide effective remote court appearances.  We all saw the video of an attorney appearing online as a cat during a remote hearing. He pleaded that he wasn’t really a cat, but had no idea how to change his screen appearance.  It was every lawyer’s nightmare.  In this context, the College created the Task Force, mandating it to provide guidance and best practices for the new and emerging technology that would affect litigation in the 21^st century.

As Chair, current President John Day led the Task Force to produce guidance papers on best practices for successful remote hearings.  As COVID persisted and the need for ongoing guidance became evident, the Task Force was elevated to a General Committee, informally known as A21C.  A21C members produced eight terrific remote hearing guidance papers in less than two years.  When John Day stepped down as A21C Chair and COVID was in the rearview mirror, remote hearings had been widely accepted as a mode of hearing and would remain so in the foreseeable future.  By then, other national legal organizations had filled the educational gap with guidance and CLE programming on remote hearings, and the need for further instruction in that area had waned.

At that point, A21C looked to its mandate to address new technology that would affect litigation in the 21^st Century.  Artificial intelligence emerged as the obvious next focus. As the Committee considered how it might engage with AI, it became clear that the pace and scope of the technology’s development exceeded what our small committee could realistically sustain. At the same time, the subject was being addressed more fully by organizations and academic centers with the resources to follow it closely, limiting what A21C could reasonably add.

To A21C’s credit, the Committee developed and delivered two highly successful CLE programs on AI at the 2024 and 2025 Spring Meetings.  The first was a primer that introduced Fellows to basic AI concepts and the ways AI was already being used by experts, particularly in jury trials. The second CLE explored ethical issues in the use of AI through a novel and entertaining debate format. Based on the positive response to those presentations, the Committee recommends continuing to use expert panels as an effective model for AI educational programming, given the pace of its development and the level of interest among Fellows.

Although the Committee had been extremely productive during COVID, defining a clear role became more difficult once that period ended. In one final effort focused on remote hearings, A21C undertook a study of whether the widespread shift to remote proceedings was, by rule or in practice, meaningfully displacing in-person hearings and trials. The Committee reviewed court rules and practices across the United States and Canada and found that whether a party may appear remotely is left largely to the presiding judge’s discretion The study revealed no evidence that civil trials or major hearings are being conducted remotely as a matter of course. A paper describing the study and its findings is forthcoming.

After the CLE programs, Roslyn Levine, Committee Chair, and Bryan Slaughter, Committee Vice-Chair, concluded that A21C had largely fulfilled its purpose and that it had reached a natural stopping point. They consulted the College’s executive and asked the Board of Regents to determine whether the Committee should continue. The Board of Regents decided to “sunset” the Committee at the end of the College’s year in the fall.  The Board further determined that matters formerly within A21C’s mandate would be handled by other appropriate committees.