Computers in Litigation Support

• Autore: Eve Wilson
• Pagine: 115-125

Page 115

@1. Motivation for Change

Lawyers today are facing increased pressure. The reasons are twofold:

* Competition within the profession

The supply of new lawyers exceeds current demand. The year ending July 31st 1992 England and Wales saw the emergence of 4,464 newly qualified solicitors (Law Society Annual Statistical Survey). The United States produces 35000 new lawyers every year (American Bar Association).

* Client demand

The recession has led to straitened budgets in corporate legal departments [Tully 1992]. Private firms wanting corporate business have to accept more stringent scrutiny of working practice and a demand for transaction billing Instead of time-billing, i.e. billing for the task done, not for the time taken to accomplish it. This attitude is percolating through to private clients, who are increasingly demanding headline prices that are directly comparable and choosing firms that offer more for their money through the provision of a better service and enhanced lawyer-client relationships.

Law firms thus feel the need to Improve both quality and efficiency. Many see Information technology as a means to this end - not only in back-office systems to Increase the productivity of fee-earners but in high-profile systems to enhance the firm's Image and facilitate marketing. They see IT as enabling them to offer customers new Information services and feel that the provision of such services will give new business opportunities, and increase their competitiveness over rival firms.

Corporate business is not merely approving this attitude, but providing positive incentives by way of partnership agreements in which law firms and corporate client collaborate to mutual advantage in the development ofPage 116 new IT systems to reduce costs, improve quality and facilitate communication. For example, the law firm might be provided with a database management system, while in retain they would be expected to acquire their own network and communication links so that the client could automatically access electronic case status reports without resort to personal Interaction with the lawyer.

@2. Tools for Change

Innovation in litigation support requires the development of increasingly sophisticated tools often with disparate technical approaches. Tools currently ripe for exploitation include word-processing, document management information retrieval, data analysis and report generation, on-line transcription, networks and document standards.

@@i) Word-processing

Word processors for document production are now common, if not ubiquitous, but do not always Improve productivity, especially if workstations remain largely within the province of the secretary rather than the lawyer. In the United States the proportion of lawyers in large firms with workstations at or near their desks is 61% [Chicago Kent Survey], while in England it is only 10% [Robson Rhodes Survey]. It is interesting to compare these with the ratio of lawyers to secretaries: unchanged yet in England, but increased to 2 - 1 or even 3 - 1 in the United States. The electronic documents created by word-processing can form the basis of an in-house precedent system, ie a corporate database that is easily accessibled by all lawyers with appropriate access permissions. This can only be achieved by:

* Standardising storage systems, organising disc allocation and automatic archiving throughout the system network;

* Taking document management and versioning out of users' hands and increasing security by using a single data entry point;

* Promoting sharing of knowledge and specialist expertise.

These goals can only be attained trough a document management system.

@@ii) Document management: storage

Document management cannot only be used to preserve documents generated in-house, but to handle all documents associated with a casePage 117 including not only documents submitted as evidence but witness statements, supporting pleas, mitigations and legal arguments, i.e. everything involved in case preparation and case management during trial. There are three main systems types:

* Conventional database management system combined with manual indexing

Here, skilled indexers assign to every document associated with a case a set of identifying tags or keywords using a controlled vocabulary designed for the case and used within strict guidelines. Information fields may include: document number, date, author, title, recipient, names mentioned, key terms. Once this information has been entered in die database it can be used by anyone associated with the case to create document chronologies, indices, discovery lists and lists for trial bundles. The documents themselves are stored and retrieved manually. Proponents of this type of litigation support include Graham J.H. Smith [Smith G.J.H.]. Other practitioners argue that this method does not guarantee exhaustive recall in a search process.

* Imaging with DBMS and manual indexing fields and index terms that represent a document an image of the document. The image is produced by scanning the original document with a laser beam. The density of the scan (in dots per inch) determinas the amount of electronic storage that the image will require. This can be considerable, for example a sheet of A4 scanned at 300 dpi might require 8 megabytes. This might be reduced to 20-30 kilobytes by using compression techniques such as TIFF (Tagged Image Format File). Nevertheless an effective imaging system will need:

* Mass storage, such as an optical disc,

* A jukebox to give acces to multiple user, and

* A local or wide area network adequate for the density of traffic such a system will generate.

The cost in capital in capital purchase and maintenance of this...