Information Technology and the Practice of Law
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Pages | 9 |
2011, July, Pg. 9. Information Technology and the Practice of Law
July 2011
Vol. 40, No. 7 [Page 9]
CBA President's Message to Members
Anyone who knows me will not be surprisedby the subject of my inaugural President's Message. I have long been an advocate for the use of information technology in the practice of law. From the relative obscurity of rural Western Colorado, I have traveled to such places as London, Honolulu, Toronto, and St. Croix to speak on various subjects within the broad topic of information technology and the practice of law. Maybe one message on this theme will be enough during my term as CBA President; maybe not. Time will tell.
Technology 101
My involvement with computers began in law school when I bought an original Mac. It had no hard disk drive. I bought the extra floppy drive so that we (I shared the computer with my wife Mary Jane) could put an application in one drive and our working file in the other.
After law school, I joined a firm that had bought new computers a couple of years earlier. A few years later, when that firm dissolved and I became half-owner with the remaining partner, we learned we needed to upgrade. It seems our predecessors had bet on CP/M becoming the prevailing operating system instead of MS-DOS.
In the mid-'80s, computers generally were within the exclusive domain of support staff. In our case, our assistants were the only people in the office who knew anything about using the computers we had. That struck me as impractical. It took only a few years in practice for me to realize that jury instructions were written on weekends or evenings, and major briefs or contracts were completed in the wee hours-precisely those times when support staff are living lives and young attorneys are not. The way to fix this, I reasoned, was for me to learn how to use these glorified typewriters. (Oh, I knew how to type; my mother had seen to that while I was in high school.)
When the time came to buy the new computers, I told my partner that I intended to observe the installation and setup with an eye toward gaining a basic understanding of how they worked. I was thinking along the lines of learning how to turn them on and off, and maybe-just maybe-how to create and print a document. Lofty goals, indeed! I learned that using Word Star to produce simple documents was like using an eighteen-wheeler to deliver newspapers door-to-door. Then I discovered WordPerfect 5.1!
Lawyers as Information Workers
It began to make sense for attorneys to compose and draft their own documents using a good word processing application. Early on, though, personal computers had not matured to devices proficient at storing, organizing, and retrieving information. Access to Westlaw and Lexis was painstakingly slow and outrageously expensive, and the search tools were just plain hard to use. This was all about to change.
As personal computers matured...
To continue reading
Request your trial