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Samuel A. Guiberson
Law
Technology News
May 1999
It's not just what you can buy, it's how you use technology to champion your case.
By Samuel Guiberson
DESPITE all the millennial hubbub about computers, the real Y2K problem for the legal profession is getting lawyers to think like it's the year 2000, and not the year 1900.
In an era when all the technology you need to handle computer litigation support can be purchased by a kid with a paper route, it should be obvious that money alone doesn't compute. The brute force tactic of throwing a hundred associates at a client's problem doesn't insure courtroom superiority either. Neither human capital nor financial capital has as much influence as they once had over lawyers' success in trial. Today, size matters much less than smarts.
Multiplying the power of a law practice by exploiting what digital information management has to offer requires more than new machines. It requires a new mindset. Buying technology to accumulate information offers no competitive edge to the advocate who doesn't also learn how to maneuver through it. That is the difference between managing information and managing to win.
The technology revolution in law practice is not at all about information, but it is about intellect. Technology alone will not move information without intelligence. Too many practitioners misplace their confidence in the technology itself. They equate it to a microwave oven we might use to cook the same old recipes more quickly. What technology truly offers us is a new chemistry of thought.
The computer revolution begins only when we choose to explore what these machines can do to help us think, rather than expect them to think for us. The profit of technology for lawyers is not in the change in our methods, but in the change in our minds.
Our ordinary way of acquiring information for trial is the familiar paper trail. We read documents sequentially from first to last and draw from that progression our idea of how to use that information in trial. We are limited by our recollection of what we read first, and tend to overemphasize what we have learned recently. Information intake takes time, and the longer we are from information the less our minds can do with it. This limitation is so much a part of the way we have always acquired knowledge that we fail to recognize it is only a byproduct of print technology.
Digital technology allows lawyers to stop walking along a paper trail and instead prepare for trial from the center of a paper sphere. The surface of that sphere is the ever-widening universe of available information in which all relationships between facts, documents, and all trial resources of every kind are equidistant, and instantaneously accessible to the lawyer's analysis.
In the paper sphere, the mind can explore different relationships in the facts, discover heretofore unclear contradictions, and gain mental mastery of a far greater quantity of information than has ever been possible before. Because digital information management allows us to acquire knowledge differently, what we know is different from what we could know before, even from the same set of facts.
Information tactics have now become trial tactics. What we see in information and what is there to see is not necessarily the same. How well attorneys visualize advantages in the information they have to work with sets the limits for what can be done to win at trial. The larger the universe of facts that we must draw into our minds and hold there, the more the limits of our advocacy are set by how we choose to organize these facts. Because information technology now affords us different ways of envisioning information, the means and methods of our analysis shape the form and substance of our insights.
Computer assisted analytical techniques change how we think by changing the way we think with the information we have. A technology we first thought would serve as a mental crutch now seems more likely to become a new limb for our minds.
This same awakening to the realization that our mental capabilities settle to the level of the technology we employ is occurring in every knowledge industry. The most dramatic changes the information age has brought are a consequence of human beings adapting to a new environment—responding to a technological stimulus that is bringing about a mental reaction. Information gathering, processing and analysis—at vastly greater speed and on a vastly greater scale—has accelerated the synapses of modern science, commerce, and industry.
Law practice will be no less
changed. Litigation practice
will change the most. Our whole
planet is going back to school. All
of us are students enrolling in a course from which we will learn what will
become possible. The course is
self-taught. It is up to lawyers
to seize the opportunity that digital technology has brought—to retrain
ourselves to do with our minds all that our machines have now made possible.
