Personal Computing and the Lawyer:
New Teeth for the Old Tiger?
Samuel A. Guiberson
The Champion, March 1990
The personal computer has been offered up to the general public as if it were a data-swallowing version of the all-purpose slicer-dicer, with the combination eggbeater and fire starter attachment in a one-time TV offer. The computer sales evangelists have made personal computers out to be cut-rate miracles, instead of first-rate tools. Tools, you remember, were things you bought and used to help you while you worked: the computer, we have been led to believe, is more like a magic spell that does your work for yousort of a bewitched lawnmower that you can buy to cut the grass while you go out dancing.
It has been dawning on a lot of us that the promises made about the computer transforming your life just by taking it out of the box, are so much silicon snake oil. Neophyte computer users believe that the only intellectual involvement required of them is to figure out what kind of machine they need to buy, because the computer industry's dogs and ponies have hawked the virtues of the product, while playing down the learning process that is equally indispensable to the fulfillment of computing's promise.
We should know better. We should recognize that the day-to-day office problems aren't going to lift out of our practices like the morning fog. We should have sensed that, when a revolution comes along, there is more that must change than what sits on the desktop. Even though the computer industry has shrilled this monumental tool of historical transformation as if it were a new brand of toothbrush with a bend in the grip, the limitations of their vision need not be the limits of our own.
Computing's indispensable learning process involves more than learning a few software programs. It starts with losing the illusion that computers are omnipotent servants awaiting your command and accepting computers for what they are: pesky appliances for human insight. It means adjusting to new ways of doing your work, charting new roads we must travel if we want to go beyond the "PC as Paperweight" stage, and benefit from the full potential of the single most powerful technological development since the Middle Ages.
The choice we have is a simple one: do we surrender in disillusionment because we actually have to work to learn how to fulfill the computer's potential, or do we just settle for what is obvious and convenient? I hope that the legal profession, and particularly criminal defense lawyers, choose the course of imagination and potential.
Getting Your Feet Wet
The newly computerized lawyer is handicapped by frustration over not having spontaneously acquired the superhuman capabilities promised by the computer industry. The newly computerized lawyer, thus, suffers a self-inflicted sense of defeatism, which controls future attitudes toward computers. New users would rather under-use the hardware than ride the long learning curve toward membership in the New Age.
The cure for what ails the computer underachiever is self-awareness, beginning with an inward look at how we do what we do, followed by an outward look at what we don't do, but need to be doing.
The first honest observation of the way we work is that, as we immerse ourselves in a set of facts and the needs of a client in his case, we tend to focus more upon the work we have to do rather than upon how we could do the work better. We disdain reflection on processes and methods.
The people who get the most out of computers assign a high value to process analysis: they defer working on a problem until they understand how they need to apply themselves to every problem of that kind, instead of doing it "the lawyer's way," the other way around, the ad hoc way.
Computers perform best when they are used in what is known as a systems approach to doing things. The best uses for computers grow out of integrating many actions into a single scheme, or out of recognizing a string of single actions in a complex problem. The art and skill of people who do systems thinking is in recognizing patterns: patterns in the subject matter they address, and patterns in the way they address that subject matter.
Nothing in this comparison suggests that we are stupid or inefficient in what we do. Most of us work at or near our optimum efficiency, at least within the framework of the way we have learned to perform legal work.
Enter the personal computer revolution and its complex of interactive communications and information storage, and retrieval systems. What does this planet-wide orgy of information technology mean to you, the criminal defense lawyer? To answer that question, put aside all the obvious personal stylistic differences between yourself and your colleagues. Look at the fundamental question: What are we?
We are professional information exchangers. We filter data (what we have been told by clients, other lawyers, prosecutors, and witnesses, along with all we have read) through our own acquired knowledge sets (the law, procedure, forensics, professional judgment, personal experience). All this taken together amounts to the craft we apply toward bettering our client's prospects.
Lawyering is a knowledge-based activity. We are knowledge workers, for whom information is the fuel of inspiration. Our primary work problem is pooling all the useful information we can into the most clear and placid pond, a pond in which we can clearly picture a reflection of our client's best interest.
For most of our professional lives, we have lived in an era in which our appetite for information (and ability to digest it) has remained constant, limited by the conventional information technology of our parents' generation. Like goldfish, we think we swim freely in an ocean of information, while bumping our noses against a fishbowl made of nothing more than our limited experience.
For example, we are trained to operate the information storage devices known as law libraries. We know how libraries are organized and where the data we need for the decision-making is stored in them. If being content in the fishbowl of the law library is commendable and professional because it is a traditional part of the practice of law, then learning how to swim freely in the sea of information available from computers can only be more commendable and more professional, since cubic inch for cubic inch, computers can preserve and present about a billion times more information about the law than a building filled with law books.
Sink or Swim?Lawyers who feel they are cheating their practices when they take time away from case work to learn to use computing and telecommunications are victims of a conventional mindset that confuses professional form with professional substance. They believe that learning software, or building a database, or learning to network with other lawyers via a modem, is being "into computing," not lawyering. They view the time it takes to acquire new technology as displacing time better spent being a "real" lawyer. And since the conventional wisdom is that learning new technology is not how lawyers should spend their time, they delegate learning the new technology to non-attorneys. In so doing, they guarantee that no one in their office who has a lawyer's portfolio has the slightest idea how that new technology can enhance what we do. Such lawyers underestimate the meaning of the change that is afoot, taking it for a quicker and more convenient way to cook an old recipe, rather than for what it truly is, an entirely new chemistry of thought.
The key to professional survival in the Information Age is to adjust your thinking to distinguish between professional techniques and mere professional technologies. Once you recognize that your professional techniques will remain intact, regardless of the legal technology, change is never threatening. Once you learn that what is fundamental to your craft is served, but not measured, by the equipment that gets the job done, it won't matter whether you pull your cases together using sheets of paper, optical discs, or laser beams from space. Your professional ship will remain upright in even the most technologically tumultuous times.
