Fast, Efficient : Computers: Electronic Legal Eagles
The worried woman walked into her lawyer’s office two hours before she planned to leave for China. She would feel better about the trip, she said, if she had a will.
James Stewart Cameron, the only attorney in the tiny town of Gualala (population 700), a mere dot on the Mendocino County coast, sat down with the woman at his computer terminal, slipped in a “wills and trusts” disk, asked her a few questions, selected appropriate clauses from the prepared text, added a few custom phrases and created her will.
“I ran it off on the printer and dragged two people out of the supermarket next door to witness it and she was on her way in about an hour,” Cameron said. “I couldn’t have done that without a computer.”
Faster, Cheaper
From the small offices of sole practitioners to the multifloor and several-city complexes of vast government and private law firms, the computer is belatedly moving into a profession long mired in the musty traditions of papyrus and quill pens.
The revolution promises to make the practice of law faster, cheaper, more thorough, more efficient, more productive and even more fun, benefiting clients and lawyers alike.
By making short shrift of the “donkey work” of endless retyping, computers allow clients to alter their wills at a whim without incurring ire or extra billing from the lawyer, and they permit attorneys to insert the perfect word or the extra fact into a brief without missing a court deadline or requiring a typist to work overtime. Computers handle billing, process documents and research case law comprehensively and quickly, freeing the lawyer to analyze, ponder, plan and, most important, to spend more time with his clients.
Prime Market
“In 1971, you would ask lawyers at a seminar how many had computers, and three or four out of 100 did,” said Berne Rolston, member of the 32-lawyer Beverly Hills firm of Leff & Mason and chairman-elect of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s Law Office Management Section. “Now 90% do.”
With more than 90,000 of the nation’s 600,000 lawyers and a reputation for using state-of-the-art technology, California is regarded as a prime market for legal software and the computers to run it.
The field is growing so fast that the American Bar Assn. and its Council on Legal Economics recently set up the legal technology advisory council to analyze the usability of software made for the legal profession by about 550 vendors. Programs range from VertiSoft Corp.’s time and billing package called Ivory, designed for sole practitioners at $6.95, to Matthew Bender’s form wills and other documents, priced from $395 to $1,995.
“We were set up because the ABA, which is definitely promoting automation, felt lawyers were having trouble selecting software and that that was slowing down automation,” said Richard L. Robbins, an electrical engineer and lawyer who once built computers and now heads the advisory council. “We get 10 to 20 calls a day asking for our reports.”
Computers are becoming so ingrained in lawyers’ lives that Daily Journal satire columnist Milt Policzer humorously suggested in his annual predictions last January that 1985 might produce the first court appearance by a computer (filling in for an attorney stuck in traffic) and the first computer to be held in contempt of court.
Computers first made inroads into law offices a decade ago in the limited form of word processors. Next came small computers, also called personal computers or microcomputers, for billing clients and keeping track of lawyers’ working hours on which the bills were based. Today, however, the lawyers may be as comfortable at the keyboards as their secretaries, and they are expanding the uses.
The more adept barristers, assisted by a plethora of specially designed software, draft documents instead of dictating them, index evidence and testimony, compute and compare financial data for taxes and trusts and comprehensively research case law established by appellate courts throughout the English-speaking world.
They are convinced that their new-found skills help their clients.
Clients’ Bills Cut
Cameron raised his rates from $65 to $75 an hour when he bought two personal computers and subscribed to the software with form documents in six subjects, but he said clients’ bills averaged only 60% of the previous amount because he could do the work in fewer hours. He saved so much time, he quipped, that he lost money--until he tripled his caseload.
Although lawyers do not commonly cut their rates or lay off personnel because of automation, they agree that electronic streamlining forestalls rate increases and allows offices to expand productivity markedly without adding employees or hours. That potential is crucial for poverty law firms, which charge no fees and operate largely on government or private grants, and for government lawyers.
Gary Blasi, attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said he began computerizing data “out of necessity” in 1981 when he and one other lawyer in the group’s eviction defense center were handling 900 cases a year.
Without a computer to docket court dates for the various cases, index data and prepare the paper work, he said, two lawyers could never handle such volume. Although his office has only four word processors, Blasi recently bought his own small computer to manage and analyze evidence in cases for homeless people, and he often serves as a consultant to other firms that aid the poor.
The state of California will spend $2.8 million over the next three years to equip its Department of Justice offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego with enough computers so that its 500 lawyers can compose their own documents, send electronic messages to each other and draw on “brief banks,” electronic libraries of reusable work created by various deputy attorney generals.
‘Will Be Cost-Effective’
The offices use an approach that is unique: It centers on attorneys keyboarding their own work.
“We think this will be cost-effective for the taxpayer,” said Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. Nelson Kempsky, who is in charge of implementing the program, despite the cost of equipment, “because we can avoid growth in the numbers of support personnel. The business of litigation continues to grow and grow, and the governor is interested in using modern technology rather than increase the number of people in state government.”
Speed may be more important than money to clients who pay $250 an hour for services of the 100-year-old Los Angeles megafirm of O’Melveny & Myers, and computers can help its 360 attorneys deliver that.
“Computerization allows us to deliver faster, more efficient work for our clients,” said Stuart B. Tobisman, an attorney who oversees the firm’s evolving computerization, which includes an accounting center, a word processing center and centrally located computer work stations for use by willing lawyers.
“I can prepare documents for three or four clients now in the same time it would have taken for one 10 years ago,” he said.
Computers’ greatest gift to the consumer or client, Cameron firmly believes, is a higher quality of work from the lawyer.
Broader Spectrum
As a sole practitioner in a small town, he cannot limit himself to his specialties of civil rights and medical malpractice, because the area’s 2,000 residents need wills written, corporations formed or dissolved and divorces filed. Computers and the proper tailor-made programs make him an expert in all fields. Lawyers never make money on wills, said Cameron, who charges $60 to prepare one. But where he used to write a simple will in two pages, he can now turn out a 14-page thoroughly complete document at no greater cost.
“Everything,” he said, “is just better.”
Although they have approached computerization gingerly, lawyers are beginning to realize that it has major benefits for them as well as for their clients. One of those benefits is the ability to quickly copy existing “form” suits or arguments, customizing them for situations and clients.
“Lawyers are infamous plagiarists. That is why they became real cut-and-paste artists,” said Deanna L. Davisson, national customer support manager for Matthew Bender, veteran producer of legal forms. “This is kind of a fancy cut and paste.”
Bender, a New York-based subsidiary of Times Mirror Co., which also owns The Los Angeles Times, has printed form books for 98 years, providing attorneys with “boilerplate” or standard pre-written documents that can be copied and used repeatedly with only slight adaptations. In 1973, the company pioneered electronic versions of the form documents by marketing them as computer programs for six legal subjects tailored to California law: wills and trusts, probate, personal injury, domestic relations, corporations and real estate.
‘I Resisted Computers’
Computers also permit faster, more comprehensive research of existing case law through the 12-year-old LEXIS, produced by Mead Data Central of Dayton, and WESTLAW by West Publishing Co. Accessible to subscribers in law firms and libraries through specially leased terminals or personal computers, the systems contain texts of state and federal appellate and Supreme Court decisions.
“Personally, I resisted computers for a long time. There was something unorthodox and inappropriate for a lawyer not sitting down in a library and poring over books for hours,” said Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, who borrows computer access from generous law firms.
“But I have been converted. In some U.S. Supreme Court cases when I needed a national perspective, the computer just absolutely wiped out manual research.”
Sometimes computer research is too easy, said Demetrios Dimitriou, San Francisco attorney in a four-lawyer office who serves on the ABA Council of Legal Economics, creating a new problem for lawyers.
“It’s like the old joke, ‘please excuse my 15-page letter but I don’t have time to cut it to three.’ With the computer, you research 2,500 cases, not four cases,” said Dimitriou. “You become inundated with too much information. You need new skills of selectivity.”
‘More Thinking’
Law has always been a long-hours profession, with the average workweek stretching from 50 to 60 hours. Attorneys agree that computers do not reduce those hours but say they do cut the time spent on drudgery and increase time for talking with clients and simply for thinking.
“The lawyer is really free to do more thinking and less scribbling,” said Richard S. Arnold, partner in charge of estate planning for the 120-lawyer Century City firm of Wyman, Bautzer, Rothman, Kuchel & Silbert, who uses computers in the office and at home to analyze tax data, research law and write. “I can spend more time being an architect and less being a carpenter.”
Computers can brighten a lawyer’s life, Tobisman and Arnold agreed, by letting him work at home, for example, instead of driving to the office on weekends.
The machines can also help sole practitioners compete with major law firms.
“It makes law more democratic,” Cameron said. “If O’Melveny & Myers filed a contract suit against my client before, I would have had to send him to a large law firm. It would not be economical for him to pay me to catch up with the research that is in O’Melveny’s files. But now I don’t have to do the research. I can run it down in WESTLAW and generate documents. The computer gives me the paper leverage to fight back. It will be much more difficult for a big firm to bury a guy in paper if he has computer support.”
Libraries Still Needed
Just as the computer has failed to replace secretaries or paralegals, users doubt that it will ever replace law libraries or paper, although it now provides electronic research and ultimately will permit filing of documents in court via telephone lines. They do believe, however, that electronic filing can reduce the number of libraries and the amount of costly storage space devoted to paper documents.
Despite the problems--occasional loss of documents, expense, unrealistic expectations, abstract symbols that lack the tactile attractions of paper--no lawyer who has ever touched a computer, or persuaded his secretary to operate one, is willing to give it up. They are convinced that the computer allows them to practice law more productively, efficiently and happily.
“It’s funny,” Cameron said, “that the ultramodern computer allows you to be old fashioned. It gives you time to deal with people and have a general practice. If I had my druthers, I would be out in the backwoods with three lawbooks under my arm. The computer frees me to be almost that kind of small-town lawyer.”
