Senile Musings of the World's Oldest Baby Boomer Lawyer- How Technology Has Changed The Practice of Law.
Indulge me for a moment. Today is my birthday. I'm old. I've been practicing law fo
r a long time (parts of five decades). I'm slightly nostalgic on this, the occasion of my becoming a ward of the state. This blog talks generally about technology and the law. This post will address technology in the law.
I know that most of you assume that the internet has existed forever. At least since the nineties, which is forever for a lot of you. Let me describe the technology of law when I first burst on the scene in the 70s: Lawyers dictating to secretaries (no one knew what an administrative assistant was) sitting at the end of the desk while the lawyer paced and talked, secretaries taking the dictation in shorthand on steno pads, secretaries typing on manual typewriters with carbon paper making one copy on onion skin paper, other lawyers dictating on Dictaphones (machines about the size of an old VCR with a circular magnetic tape), which was then given to a secretary for transcribing, no lawyer would have deemed to do his or her own typing even if they could.
Then the advancements starting coming in torrents (at least one or two every three or four years):
- Electric typewriters, first with an arm and a head for each character and then followed by a rotating ball with all characters (Selectric typewriters)
- Self correcting electric typewriters (mistakes were corrected not by erasing and retyping but by backing up and typing the incorrect character(s) again, which pounded a white material into the prior indentation. This didn't do anything for the underlying copy, which still had to be manually corrected)
- Copiers - big, clunky, expensive, slow moving machines
- Fax machines - one line for the whole firm and it was used only on special
occasions - Hand held dictation equipment, first with full sized cassette tapes and then later with mini-cassettes
- Mag-card "word processors" - the first "computerized" advance in office technology. Machines about the size of small refrigerators, which had magnetic media (in the shape of old IBM punch cards) on which you put standard documents with blanks in the text for names, addresses, etc. These large machines were attached to Selectric typewriters that would operate until it found one of these blanks indicated by a "stop code" at which point the typewriter would stop and the operator would enter the optional text manually. These machines were hot and noisy and had to be enclosed in a room with sound absorbing material and were run overnight because of the long production time for large documents and the fact that there were only a few machines for the entire firm.
- The advent of personal computers moved rudimentary word processing to the administrative assistants desk tops and Word Perfect ruled the legal world a
nd only special Word Perfect gurus knew how to use the "codes". - Legal research by computer was introduced by Lexis-Nexis. One large terminal tucked way back in the library with an exorbitant per minute search rate and a per line print rate with a printer as part of the terminal.
- Desktops, then laptops with Microsoft Word and Westlaw and the internet and mobile phones evolving into pocket held computers, Microsoft 365, Google voice, Google docs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Avvo, social media, the cloud, etc., etc. and the torrent really has begun.
However, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even though technology has changed the face of law practice, the same basics remain: Lawyer competence, client contact and trust and good, old fashioned integrity still count. Maybe now more than ever.
Thanks for indulging me. I look forward to many more advances over the next five decades.
