A Practical Guide to Professional Computing
Samuel A. Guiberson
Litigation Applications, 1993
Part I
Today, for the price of a candy apple red Harley Davidson motorcycle, you can purchase more computer processing speed than the Pentagon had during the Vietnam war. And yet, despite all the inexpensive, feature-rich software available, all the ultra-sophisticated hardware that you can order over the phone faster than an all–the-way pizza, despite all the conspicuous consumption of this wealth of technology, there remains a disturbing poverty of insight about how to gain professional benefits from computing.
I think every one of us has wondered, "I know this computer thing was supposed to change my professional life, I’ve spent a lot of money, why is it still so hard?" Why is there still such a high level of frustration in working with this technology? The answer to that question is not where you would expect to find it, because the question has a false premise. That false premise is that professional computing was supposed to be easy.
We have been told by a generation of computer marketing mavens that, if we just paid our money and bought their fancy new computers, all we had to do was whip it out of the box, set it up on the desk, and everything would change—everything about the way we practice law would be different for the better. The computer would be our magic lawnmower. Take it out of the box and it will mow your lawn while you go out dancing. They dreamt us our dream, that we could relax into law office automation and the computers would do all the work for us. In so doing, they glorified the importance of the product, and ignored the importance of the process. We followed suit.
Computing—effective, professional computing for lawyers—isn't about the power of buying, it is about the power of trying. Results flow from the time you dedicate to developing an understanding of the technology, a human-to-machine rapport, and not from mesmerizing yourself with how much money this or that product costs, or whether you need a wall-sized monitor, or woolly mammoth hard drive. Before you can achieve practical benefits from computing, you have to stop being in love with computers; I guess that is the "Zen of PC's,” Transcendental Computerization, we'll call it.
It is the First Commandment of "TC," I tell you, that if you really expect your computer to be anything more than a four thousand dollar paperweight, you must transcend the material—the delusion that the more hardware in front of you, the more computer proficiency you have, or that the more software you buy, the more software you know. Relying on the form and quantity of the technology to make you more productive is a very costly mistake that insures your ultimate disappointment with your professional computing.
Computers are not microwave ovens. They are not new appliances for cooking the same old recipes a little quicker. Computing represents a new chemistry for thought, a new way for you to be more creative in exploiting the expanding universe of information now within the grasp of any computing professional.
We hear so much in our profession about the application of technology to the administrative side of our practice—the notion that we can do time keeping, scheduling, conflict management and billing; things that make a law practice (or a factory assembly line) go more smoothly and more quickly. This is what is known as "enterprise computing.” No question that computers can improve the efficiency with which things move along a conveyor belt. But there is a much grander vision of why computers are worth the work they make us do.
As litigators, we are not so much interested in "enterprise computing" as we should be in "innerprize computing.” Innerprize computing is about intellectual enhancements flowing from the skillful use of computing, such as increasing the litigator's ability to gain more complex insights out of progressively larger quantities of more complex information. The goal is a quality of organization and analysis unlike anything we have known in our professional lives. To pursue that prize, we have to expect a personal computer to be more than an electronic filing cabinet.
We also have to learn that a computer is not a technological crutch we use to walk through law practice painlessly. The computer is not in front of you to just prop you up; instead, think of it as a new limb for your mind. It is the gift of more power over information that makes legal computing worth the ordeal of changing the way you will practice law for the rest of your professional life.
Since we have recently inaugurated a new president, and since I hope to inaugurate a new mindset for your professional computing, let me reach back to slightly modify a well-known quote from a past inauguration. The first guiding principle in really using computers should be, "ask not what your computer can do for you, ask what you can do with your computer.” You will be surprised how differently you will evaluate computer technology when you make that simple change in orientation, that conceptual shift from expecting technology to do things for you to committing yourself to invest the time it takes to have technology do work in the way you want to do it.
Lawyer-Centered Computing
Put yourself at the center of the process of deciding what you need to be doing with a computer, and what you need to buy to do it.
Not too many years ago, I had the experience of taking a $40,000 NBI system out behind a hotel in the dark of night and throwing it in a dumpster, far from my office where none of my friends would see me. I was crying at the time. I was not crying because I was sorry to be rid of this obsolete monstrosity. I was crying because I still had $15,000 left to pay on the bank note.
How did my first big investment in a computer system end on such a pathetic note? It was simply because I allowed myself to be intimidated by a salesman who said he knew what I needed, "technology-wise," I think was the way he put it. I accepted the promises of all the people who wanted to tell me what was best for me in order to sell it to me. I had to learn the hard way that nobody with a product to sell knows whether that product will work for me any better than I do.
It's no wonder we feel inadequate to make our own decisions about technology. Millions of dollars in ad money have been funneled into our heads to condition us into accepting that buying the latest computers was the key thing, not learning what to do with them. It is doubtful that so many computers would have been sold if someone had mentioned that to really exploit what they had to offer, you might have to relearn how to think. It was much better for sales to explain to the customers that once they bought a computer, they wouldn't have to think at all.
We have been lazy long enough. We have been throwing down our money and then leaping off a cliff after one office technology or another all our professional lives. It is time to stop behaving like lemmings, operating on some instinctive will to self-destruct, swimming out into technology oblivion every time a computer salesman points toward the sea. There is really nothing out there to swim toward until you know why you are swimming in the first place.
We also tend to forgive present computing inadequacies with blind faith in the future's promise. Because the computer industry has persuaded us that with its 'products' every imperfection is perfectible, we settle for half-baked software on the assurance that whatever won't deliver the goods in Word Bopper 6.1 will be made up for when Word Bopper 6.2 is released. As long as you are chasing the tail of products not yet in the marketplace, or waiting for good things to fall out of the monitor into your lap, you are never going to sit down and do the first essential thing you need to do. Use the computer screen as if it were a mirror and examine yourself. Study your personal working behavior in the practice of law.
Don't try to figure out how the computer behaves until you know how you behave. Take a fresh look at how you practice law. Use your decision to put computer technology to work in your law practice as a catalyst for self-analysis. Dedicate some office time to thinking about how you do what you do, instead of thinking only about what you have to do. Find those things you or your staff must do which are repetitive, patterned, cyclical; those are the things which technology can do better than you can. As far as those things which your brain can do better—investigate, analyze, juxtapose facts and gain insights—you will never be able to delegate those processes to a computer, but you will be able to enhance your own performance by combining your strengths with the computer's.
One of the most popular questions at computer seminars these days is, "what is the right computer for me?” I have a somewhat eccentric response to that question. I believe the best computer for you is the one you have already paid for. None of us are ready to buy into the next generation of computers until we really respect what we already have, until we get productivity from what is already known, and what we already own.
Have respect for whatever you own. Appreciate the permanent value of knowing the software you already run. Just because the program you work with hasn't been on the cover of all the computer magazines recently doesn't mean it's useless. Respect for what you know and what you own develops the confidence necessary to make your independent decisions about the technology you use. Find what works for you and keep it working.
Never abandon the known for the sake of the novel. Find a way to reach for what is new without giving up what is familiar, so you don't have to burn the village of office technology in order to save it. Don't feel that you have to make radical shifts from one computer technology to another, or from one software technology to another. You don't. There is much more prosperity and efficiency in learning a simple program well, than being victimized by knowing only ten percent of what a complicated program might do just a little bit better.
Some of the biggest firms and smartest lawyers become obsessed with entering the market at the "right" moment, buying only the "right" product, chanting like monks in a trance: "what will be the 'technologically correct' operating system in the 90's?"
What these people think they're doing by reading technology tea leaves is avoiding making a wrong decision. There is a presumption at work among all these hand wringers that there is only one "right" choice, and that only if you choose correctly will you be allowed to stay on the path of the righteous toward technology heaven. Don't waste your energy worrying about what new technology is coming over the horizon tomorrow so that you can make a good purchasing decision today.
If the recent history of computer technology has taught us anything, it's that you can only make good decisions about technology in a time frame of months, and those that dwell on making decisions about what will be in vogue years from now can't help but be wrong; because there is no single right answer as to which technology is right for this minute, much less for the rest of the millennium. So-called "strategic" decision making, based on some soothsayer's predictions about what the technology will be rather than buying what works with the technology at hand, is a major waste of time.
There are many software and hardware pathways that you can walk and be equally successful. The factor most important to your success is that you choose the one computing approach that seems to be comfortable for you, and in tune with the way you do things. That is the only "pocketbook correct" answer to the question of what product will be of enduring value to you.
Before you go out and throw your professional fate at the little plastic feet of some high dollar computer and the totally awesome software that came preloaded in it, be sure you have realized the full potential of what programs you already have in your office; reinvigorate the technology in place.
DOS: Wanted—Dead or Alive
You hear everywhere that DOS is dead. Or at least presumed dead; in computing, anything that's been around for a while must be nearly dead. We hear about all these new operating systems that are about to take over. We get tied into the notion that computer operating systems—all computer products, for that matter, are snake skins to be shed every year. Software isn't snakewear; it doesn't need to be shed in a particular season. That is especially so for operating systems. You should weigh changing an operating system with the same skepticism you would exercise in deciding whether to buy a three-wheeled car.
DOS is certainly not dead. Rather, it is the conventional way of using DOS that is dead—the notion that we should use one computer program at a time. In that mode of doing computer work, we load a program, we work in it, we conclude our work, we exit it, and then we open another program to repeat the same cycle again. That is the way most lawyers use software programs; it is the familiar way of using DOS programs sequentially, one program at a time. This way of computing is obsolete—the notion that you do all your computing work within one program.
Don't be looking for the single, best program for your law practice. Nowadays, software shouldn't be seen as single applications. It's not like choosing a spouse. Software monogamy is a thing of the past. Multitasking and task switching application environments have given rise to a different mindset—doing more with more, instead of less with less. We've entered the age of polygamous computing, applying many programs at once to that complex of disconnected data we're always trying to bring together, and which we loosely term "work.”
The two alternative multitasking approaches available to us in the DOS world are the Microsoft Windows and the Quarterdeck DESQview products. Windows is the more capable of maximizing Windows-based programs, and DESQview is more fully able to exploit DOS program multitasking. Multitasking, task switching software permits you to maintain several programs in memory simultaneously, so that you may open and close them at will, without having to exit any application before entering any other.
All the programs I load in this way, whether they are Windows applications or DOS programs, are presented as icons which become part of my screen palette. By "palette," I mean that group of programs I choose to use in combination with one another, each program contributing a certain capability I find exceptional.
I no longer think in terms of working with one program, I think in terms of building a palette of programs that, when taken together, work better for me than any program among them would running by itself. Building that palette is a strictly personal process. Finding which programs let you do your best work is a job no one else can do for you.
Successfully managing yourself and your law office through this transition from solo programs to a software symphony is definitely a head-wrenching experience. Doing it will allow your practice to take full advantage of a wider range of computing resources and make your professional computing more practical and effective.
Adopting this "suite" or "software ensemble" approach is a comfort to your budget. You no longer have to pay the price of admission to sit on the leading edge of the software circus, buying every new product in sight just to keep up. Now you can compute comfortably and productively on the lagging edge of the available technology. The useful life of DOS programs has been greatly prolonged; used in groups, they become a more attractive alternative to throwing all your familiar programs out and investing a small fortune in "Window, Window, Everywhere" applications.
You no longer have to think of DOS programs in terms of what they do by themselves; you can now think of them in terms of what unique features two or three or four programs may have that, when taken together, serve you better than any single program. You may begin to reconsider some old programs in a new category that I call "Stretchware.” They are programs that weren't designed primarily to do the one thing you think they do better than other programs. These are older programs that possess a single, exceptional feature that makes them young again as an integral part of a whole team of programs. Doing that one thing exceptionally well gives them a new longevity, stretching their useful life in a computer marketplace, being reshaped by multitasking software products.
Another advantage to using these programs in a desktop ensemble, aside from greater productivity, is that they are really cheap. They can be had for tens of dollars at a used software store. Nowadays, you don't have to over-invest. You don't have to build an elaborate Taj Mahal of expensive software to be well-served. By multitasking applications, you can assemble a set of software tools without being bound by each program's limitations or by its DOS or Windows pedigree. This is a first step toward the computing philosophy known as "open systems," the principle that software of any kind should run equally well on computer platforms of every kind. If you want to be uninhibited by computer industry marketing strategies, if you want to resist being told what is in vogue and what isn't, then focus on the open systems approach. It puts the power of choice in the user's hands by dismissing the software companies' "upgrade of the month" marketing strategies that keep the customer on an endless treadmill, repurchasing the same software over and over again, one subdecimal product release after another.
There is one school of thought about law office computing that can be summarized as, "if you've got it, flaunt it.” This is to say that, if you are computer sophisticated, you show off just how high-tech you know how to be—show people who come into the law firm how slick and sophisticated your technology is. Lawyers who think like that, believe that mesmerizing clients, other lawyers, and employees with every whizbang is a major selling point that distinguishes their legal services from the rest of the lawyering herd(my portable will peel potatoes, download stock quotes, and hum "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain" while scanning an encyclopedia!).
My opinion is that it has just the opposite effect. Such computing snobbery extinguishes these lawyers instead of distinguishing them, because their elitism cuts them off from everyone less computer hip than themselves. If you want to involve people in your professional computing as either a colleague or a client, the best strategy is to keep it simple. I believe very strongly in the notion of extending the community of computing professionals, not alienating any coworker because their computer won't race with the fastest boats.
I think you will find the best software are those programs which can lift all boats as the waters of technology rise, and not the programs that require you to be a member of the computing elite to operate. Keeping it simple allows more people with differing skill levels to collaborate in a computing office environment. I am not embarrassed by having become a software budget gourmet. I am really proud that we finally figured out, after a decade of trying, that what really works is what is most inexpensive.
Window Pain?
You hear a lot about why we should be moving to Microsoft Windows. I don't necessarily agree with the proposition that, as Sir Edmund Hillary once said about why he climbed mountains, we should all climb onto the Windows bandwagon "because it is there.” I think there is much to be said for a gradual transition to Windows programs, but I don't want to see anyone revisit sins of the past, such as "One-Way Computing." Don't leap through any Windows under the mistaken impression that, because these applications are on the scene, they are the only programs with which you can do anything important on a computer.
Windows is being hailed from every rooftop as the “must have” operating environment under which all your software must run. All your software doesn't have to be run under, around, and through Windows to get the benefit of what the Windows interface truly is; which is a promising applications environment, a place where Windows programs can do their graphical thing. Just because a family of high quality programs now call Windows home doesn't mean we all have to hum "One Interface Uber Alles.”
To make good use of the excellent Windows programs that are out there, Windows doesn't have to take over your computer lock, screen, and keyboard.
So when do you go buy Windows?
Think of it like a pet fish. You don't go to the pet store and say, "I really would like to have a fish bowl.” You wait until you decide you really want to own a pet fish. When you're ready to bring home a few little wet friends, then you go and get them a fish bowl. So it is with Windows-based programs and Windows.
Once you make the decision that there are Windows programs that you want to use, then it is time to go get Windows and start adapting yourself to that new way of working. I run Microsoft Windows under DESQview/X so that I can keep my familiar DOS programs handy, even as I move my office into an all Windows environment. I transition slowly because I don't want to give up any of the software with which I'm comfortable and capable. I love Windows, but I don't want to surrender exclusive control to its different way of doing things. I want to maintain many open channels in my computing and keep exploiting my knowledge of DOS programs while I am learning the Windows programs that meet my price/performance criteria.
Because so much competitive energy and money is being applied to program development in the Windows environment, there are some very important new programs being developed for Windows that will transform what we lawyers do with computers. But don't underestimate the price you will pay in dollars, learning time, and Windows-capable hardware. To move to an all Windows applications law office is a major undertaking. Don't make the mistake of one attorney I know, who bought a copy of Windows, thinking that it would somehow transform all his old software into Windows applications. If only it did!
Despite the much-heralded "ease of use" and "familiar interface" that is supposedly common to all Windows applications, taking your office in one fell swoop from DOS computing to Windows computing is, for all practical purposes, like starting to computerize your office all over again.
Never delegate the task of adopting or applying new technology to your practice. If you try to assign this learning experience to someone else, you only deny yourself the insight you must gain to remain competitive. It is a nonassignable, non-delegable duty. You must be at the center of the computing process. It must be you, the lawyer, not only doing the buying but also doing the trying—building a rapport with the technology so that you understand what it can do.
We have reached a point where a kid with a newspaper route can afford all the computer products you need to practice law. You can't find a competitive edge in what you own, you can find it only in what you know. That edge is going to be found in your own individual inspiration as to how to use your software and hardware better than the next lawyer. That is where you will find the benefits that make this trail worth traveling, the rewards that make the hard, honest work of adopting these new ways of computing worth the effort.
Part II
It used to be, every so often, that some super-partner from the “String of Names Law Firm” would want to stop by my office to see what all this litigation computing hocus pocus of mine was about. In would stroll Partner, with a gaggle of associates in his wake, looking like Java the Hut and the Chickadees, and begin to glide around the office trying to get the names of the software programs we used as inconspicuously as such an entourage knows how to be.
What a mistake—they believed that if they could just snatch what programs our office was using, they would have my magic computer bullets to put in their law firm's pistol. As our visitors were edging their way around the people who evolved our offices' style of litigation computing, they were blindly ignoring the real reasons for our success. Our only computer secret was that we were always experimenting, always testing, always learning about computing: that process had become our standard practice.
Whether your firm has one lawyer or one hundred, if your "status quo" is experimenting with your computing on a daily basis, nobody is going to out-computer you. The only constant in a time of change is constant change. Professional people who have learned to maintain a permanent learning process are the real assets of the computing law office.
Once you become acclimated to the idea of blending programs together in a multitasking environment, rather than doing your work through one or two old favorites, you have to confront the reality of 90's computer technology: there is no such thing as the one best program for everybody. Maintaining a learning mode is so important because nobody can teach you what programs will work best for you. There aren't going to be any computer maestros who can show you how to hit only the high notes, there are just going to be a lot of computing lawyers sharing their notes.
Having issued a global disclaimer that what programs I choose to use are not necessarily going to work as well for you, here are a few examples of how I blend the old with the new for a practical and useful personal desktop software setup.
One consequence of choosing to work in a multitasking environment like Windows or Desqview is that programs are selected not for their all around capabilities, but for what they do best. This means that I can combine programs together to make one "super application," a sort of Dream Team of DOS software. Not all of it has to be the newest. In fact, using programs as an ensemble, rather than as a parade of soloists, extends the useful life of many programs that would otherwise be considered obsolete. I call these programs "Stretchware," because the multitasking concept stretches their useful life in my office.
Using a simple menuing program for your office computers, whether you're running standalone or in a network, makes a lot of practical sense (the one I use is the $49.95 shareware program called AutoMenu. I use it to get everyone in the office across the "I'm intimidated by the mysterious computer technology" threshold, and into the "piece of cake" computing household).
I admit my plain and generic office network menu doesn't have little graphical icons. While I do appreciate all the "what you see is what you get" found in the graphical interfaces, I still believe there is a place in our computers for "what you can spell is what you get.”
By using an old-fashioned "WYSIWYG" program, I don't have to educate the new paralegal, with all of ten minutes experience working in my office, to all the subtleties of some high-end graphical interface; nor do I have to teach anybody the path to the subdirectory of the subdirectory of the case file directory, and the executable program files that apply to each one of the several dozen programs in our network. Instead, I simply put to work a cheap, simple interface that gives everybody access to what software we have, and access to what work there is in the computer that others have already done. They can simply follow the arrow. Anyone can look and see the programs they want to use and then click on the name of the program or function they want to perform. While using a menu to open programs is more single-tasking than multitasking, I still use it as a first rung in the ladder to climb out of the crevasse of overcomplicated computing.
In a multitasking environment, each computer user can work in a whole array of scaled program windows, simultaneously displaying the work product of different DOS software programs. I think this is more than just visually interesting, because having what looks like four or five little screens within your screen captures the essence of what's so powerful about multitasking. We are really working with the functional equivalent of as many computers as we have programs open. It is important to recognize that your computer screen isn't "filled up" by one program, but large enough for many programs to function side by side.
I might add that for those of you who have worked in organizations where there is a top-down mandate to use some office-wide software system that does timekeeping, the boss' favorite conflict-checking program, or the scheduling program written by his twelve-year-old nephew, you don't have to surrender your entire computer to what you're told to use. By using DESQview/X—or perhaps, less flexibly on the DOS program side, Microsoft Windows—you can scale down what the higher-ups want you to use, and scale up the programs you choose to use. You can relate to office-wide computing through one window as need be, and reserve the rest of your screen for a more self-defined software smorgasbord.
In this manner, I'd give any software I'm told to use the room it needs without compromising my computing individuality. I still have all the rest of the space on the screen to be independent and creative with the way I use my computer resources. I am not confined to the software my organization requires me to use.
If you go to a software store, they are going to laugh at you if you ask for the one I use, Microsoft Word 5.0. In using it, I found that the people at Microsoft, not necessarily on purpose, had come up with a very efficient, easy way of doing something other than what they primarily intended it to do.
As soon as I started getting a little more confident about what to do with the programs I ran, I said to myself, "wait a second! I don't have to use this program the way the people that wrote it intended it to be used; the limits of their ingenuity aren't necessarily the limits of mine. I don't have to see a word processor as just a way to write letters to my auntie, mine eyes have seen the glory of a way to organize litigation files!" Here's how.
Not too long ago, some software developer realized that with larger storage devices and more documents being generated on PC's, it was going to get burdensome to deal with all the document files the computers were putting out. A document processing program that was going to make money would have to be able to organize the document files on the hard disk as well as create documents. So, in order to help you keep track of all those letters you were writing, they built in a feature called document management, which is nothing other than a way of keeping track of the contents in your text documents by means of a simple built-in database.
To create my own classification system for the litigation documents I want to manage, I just take advantage of the flexibility of the simplest DOS naming conventions and the built-in document management features of my word processor. Taking the DOS extension, the three characters that follow the eight character name of the file, I rename the files based on the type of document it is. This is a very brainless exercise: ".SYN" might stand for synopsis. ".DEP" might indicate a deposition. ".MOT" has got to be a motion, and so on. You just adopt some simple way of changing those three characters so as to have them serve as a document identifier. Once I make the file name part of the classification system, then I can ask the software to manage the litigation documents the same way it wants to manage any other kind of file on the disk.
Most of the leading word processors have a document management component that enables you to select specific documents or sets of documents that have one attribute or a combination of attributes in common. Let's just tweak those fields to reflect what is pertinent about our case documents. Even though we can't change the names of the file management fields in most DOS word processors, we can decide for ourselves what each title will mean to us, and use them accordingly.
I should tell you that there are highly complicated $20,000 document management systems that require you to hire someone to figure them out. They will do just a little more of the same things that file management functions in simple word processors will do, maybe ten seconds faster. If you want something that everybody can use, that everybody can very quickly benefit from and, in my own experience, has worked successfully in cases with thousands of pages of documents, then adopt a text word processor as a poor lawyer's document management system. If such a program has proved adequate for us in mega-cases, it is probably going to fulfill everyday needs in most law practices.
Remember, nobody has to learn to use all the features of this program to use it in this one way. You don't have to know how to format documents and change margins in this word processor to apply it to litigation document management and text searching. In the simplicity of using this one capable feature of one "obsolete" text word processor, I find more benefit than I would obtain from a much more complicated system. That tradeoff—more modest performance for greater accessibility and ease of use—always works for me.
There are other programs that were designed to do different things with text retrieval that a lawyer can put to good use. One such program is Magellan. This program also proves that software programmers are the last people to know how their software can best be applied to real world tasks. They usually have the wrong idea about what their program does best.
For example, Magellan was built to hide the user from those hideous DOS commands—to make it simple to do things that you would otherwise have to know DOS commands to do. In the process of doing that, they gave the program a text retrieval capability that is as quick and easy as any of the programs that were designed for the purpose of retrieving text.
With Magellan, I can view any type of file very quickly in order to locate a particular document when the file name doesn't give me enough information. Even though I don't see it in the original file format, I can readily identify any document I'm looking for without opening the program that created the document. That's why it works so well in combination with other programs you are multitasking; you quickly find what you want, and then retrieve it by file name from the document's parent program that is also being multitasked as another of the programs on your software "palette.”
Magellan can also do some fast text retrieval by simply using DOS naming conventions and specifying search terms. One of the problems with most software programs built to retrieve text is that they come with manuals that are about two inches thick. Less is sometimes more when it comes to software. Not everybody is going to be able to master a more complex and capable text retrieval package to a level of proficiency that will really make their greater functionality useful. The specialty products may do it faster but, again, more modest programs will do it simpler and still give you the benefit of what you need to work with. I have used nothing more complicated than Magellan, thought to be "just" a utility program, to search text in some very large document cases.
Even in the biggest of those big document cases, by the time an unfriendly witness got the last consonant of his name out, we knew every file that related to that witness from among thousands of files. It might have been possible for us to have gotten that information with software that was much more sophisticated, and required a much longer learning curve, by the time a witness was at the middle syllable of their last name, but I don't think a second or two in retrieval time is worth the month or two it would take to master the more fully featured programs.
Not everything we work with in litigation is necessarily going to be text documents. Sometimes we have to deal with information that is best organized in databases. My advice about using the simple program rather than the complicated one applies equally well to databases.
There are flat file databases and relational databases. In my experience, the distinction between the two, for as much as I needed to do with them, was that flat file databases took me hours to learn and cost a couple hundred dollars, and the relational databases took months to learn and cost six or seven hundred dollars. You can choose whichever one you want.
Let me tell you why I think using the simpler, lagging-edge, low-end product may actually serve you better. We used the flat file database program, Reflex, in one big "numbers" case. In that case, it was important for us to be able to model the impact of different price changes on products, an important issue in the case. The database file we built was large enough to hold the sales of many corporations' entire product lines over two years, so we're talking about a substantial database.
With a relational database, you are going to spend months learning how to do what we were wanting to do, or you are going to hire someone who already knows a professional developer's database programming language, someone who will have to be attached to you at the hip, someone who will become the focal point of everything you know about your case data, and someone who will then find out that they pay seventy cents more an hour for the same work at the law firm across the street and quit on you. You will be left with something you don't know how to use, don't want to know how to use, and never would be able to use, even if you wanted to.
Reflex databases, as well as other "non-programmer" databases, can be designed in an afternoon. For that ease of use, I can live with a few seconds difference of waiting time for my query results to pop up. The new Windows-based databases, such as Approach, can be prepared in hours by amateurs like you and me. As far as the complicated, high-end database programs, sometimes "better" is the enemy of "good enough.”
It makes a lot more sense to keep the lawyer in the center of the process as the software user, knowledgeable about what is necessary to utilize computers in preparing for trial, and to use them during trial. Remember, only the lawyer who knows what a program does and how the relevant information is structured within it can ask the right questions for the computer software to answer.
A Digital World Beyond the Facts of the Case
In a trial practice, not every stitch we sew is from just one spool of thread. There is more to trial than mastering the facts of the case. I have found that it is very useful to have legal reference materials that I will need in court at my fingertips on my laptop. To accomplish that, I was once desperate enough to put the Federal Rules of Evidence into a word processing file. You don't have to input the text of the Federal Rules into your word processor as I had to do in those ancient times, i.e., a few years back. A company called InfoBase Press, (801-373-1738) markets the Federal Criminal and Civil Rules of Procedure, the Rules of Evidence, and Appellate Rules of Procedure in a run-time version of the "hypertext" program, Folio Views. Their product is an inexpensive, functional and practical way of loading all the rules you use onto your computer. West Publishing has also brought out a variety of procedure and evidence volumes on disk.
Another legal reference the Complete Computing Lawyer might dream of having on computer would be a portable library of case law. In many states, electronic publishers are producing CD-ROM digital law libraries of all state cases. In Texas, for example, we have Q-Case, an excellent Windows package that squeezes the last forty years of state case law onto a single CD-ROM disk.
A CD-ROM external drive is readily attachable to the printer port of any computer you take to the courthouse. With that accessory in place, you command all the state law on any issue, no matter how arcane. Remember, it is the full text of the cases, not headnotes, you are searching, so any reference to the person, place or issue you seek will be accessed in seconds, whether a headnote editing gnome synopsized it or not. Electronic publication of state case law is proceeding on a state-by-state basis, so you need to determine whether your jurisdiction has yet joined the Twentieth Century.
One of the nice features of the multitasking environments is that you can minimize your case law, evidence, and procedure program windows and leave them on the screen in icon scale to use only when needed. With all the case files your law library, and the reference texts you once had to lug around (and bloody your thumbs digging through under pressure), neatly reduced to the size of your notebook portable, you come to court with a formidably instantaneous recall of the facts, the rules, and the law utterly beyond the imagination of those not similarly equipped.
There are other unexplored dimensions to being a "Cyber lawyer," other bounties of information that the knowledgeable computing attorney can put to excellent use. One often overlooked reservoir of useful information is so close to home, or in this case, the office, that we ignore it—and that is the full range of all work product generated by your law office for as long there have been lawyers in it.
If you computerize all your case files, or at least put the pertinent information in a database, you won't have to rely on some octogenarian partner emeritus to remember the name of the client your firm did a dog bite case for back in the Thirties, who was blond and had a German accent. With your law office files on computer, you can search the whole range of documents that are case pertinent, the sum total of all the intellectual work product generated in your office, to find out if your firm really did represent Marlene Dietrich and that her dachshund's name was "Schnapps.”
You can find much more case-critical information than proper names for puppies when you need legal or factual background instantly—in court, out of court, at home, or on the road. Isn't the total wealth of professional experience the most important asset of the law firm? Not only did you get paid to produce it, but you get to drop it into your computer and keep using it. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. Think about the power of having instantaneous access to the collective work product of all the minds and labor that has been undertaken by your law firm.
Who could deny that this is a most unique and valuable asset to our practices, and that we need to pay more attention to bringing it all within the reach of our computer? The reason we haven't done so before now is that we haven't thought of that source of information as a physical reality. Now that it is technically possible to bring the collective experience of our entire professional lives to our ready access, it is worth investing some office time to consider what we have in those closed files (and in some heretofore closed minds) and how we might reorganize and digitize what's in them.
It is also worth our attention to figure how we can exploit the universe of useful information that is in digital form beyond the walls of our law offices. Something as simple as a ten dollar-a-month subscription to CompuServe can enable you to access a global network of information online in digital form. Why does that matter?
For example, let's imagine that you are a personal injury lawyer, expert in cases involving ACME trucks with gas tanks mounted on the side that just tend to explode in flames on impact. You pay your ten bucks a month for a CompuServe "Executive News Service" subscription and every hour of every day, CompuServe retrieves all regional and national news stories with references to ACME trucks, explosions, death, highway, and similarly focused search terms. Imagine this news event:
"DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS. The noted neurosurgeon, Bob Softheart died last evening in a fiery collision with an ACME truck on Highway 96; leaving his paraplegic wife and eight children with no means of financial support, emotionally devastated, and without a good lawyer to turn to.”
You would know about that prospective tort case at the same moment as the lawyer who lives next door to the deceased doctor's widow learns of it when he comes out to get his morning paper. If you are wondering how you can exploit your advantage over those lawyers who are less information-rich, you aren't alone. Solving the puzzle of how to make good use of this instant and global awareness of every developing legal issue, event, and precedent is going to be the quest that separates the professional success stories from the professional subsistence stories for the next decade of law practice management.
We all have had experiences with "the paper trail.” We've all spent many a weekend going over "the paper trail" of a case set for the following week. It is considered very professional, very lawyerly to flog yourself with a stack of documents. The problem with the paper trail isn't just the paper. The problem is with the way the mind acquires information. The mind will put in the foreground those facts which are most recently brought to it and absorb, analyze, and assimilate information through the lens of what is in the mind's present tense. Facts or insights acquired earlier, whether it was fifteen minutes, two hours, or three months ago, do not have the same influence over your mental impressions as does what you are thinking right now. That is the human mind's limitation in trying to absorb information sequentially: what is recently acquired is dominant.
The litigation computing techniques I have been advocating change that dynamic. Having immediate access to so much more information enables you to operate analytically as never before - not along a linear paper trail, but from the center point of a paper sphere. At the center of the sphere, all the information that is important to your litigation is poised, but a moment away from your mind's attention.
That is the dramatic change I am talking about—putting your mind's power for analysis and creativity in position to manipulate a universe of information to help win your client's case. Until recently, lawyers have practiced trial law using the same traditional and conventional paradigm for the management of case facts and legal research as was used at the turn of the century. Now we find that there are no limits to what information is available to us.
We now have to rethink how we litigate, how we use information, how we store and structure, and develop it to benefit a law practice. What computing has brought to the table changes law practice fundamentally.
What does this cultural and technological change mean for legal organizations?
You may recall that the reason we could overcome Iraq in the Gulf War when they outnumbered our troops seven–to-one was because we had our technology integrated into a maneuver strategy. We could multiply the combined force of our troops numbers by orchestrating the application of superior technology on the battlefield. That is also a fair description of the competitive advantage afforded those who really apply computing to litigation practice.
It used to be that a law firm had a competitive edge because it could put 150 heartbeats with JD degrees on a client's problem faster than the next firm. That was the way to gain the competitive edge—through the brute force application of intellectual resources. No longer.
Because of the hierarchical structure of management in organizations like the major law firms, they cannot assimilate the technology quickly enough to compete with lawyers in smaller organizations who can technologically outmaneuver them. There are firms that have actually struggled for a year over whether or not they should migrate the firm from WordPerfect 5.0 to WordPerfect 5.1. Can you imagine the number of committee meetings that were held to make that giant leap for humankind?
For those of us working in small organizations, there are now larger fish out there for us to catch. We can achieve a level of practice working within a small and sophisticated ensemble of technologically capable lawyers and staff people, that was once reserved only for the largest firms.
That is the reality of the competitive legal environment we work
in today. Anyone can use
technology to their professional advantage by seizing upon their own computing
insights to inspire a new standard of litigation performance.
