Technology, Legal Practice and New

The invention of affordable personal computing in the late 1960s, along with new communication technologies, [Page 1471]has made a huge impact on economic and social life. Many commentators describe this as a third industrial revolution that is creating an information society. One can get a sense of the scale of the changes, and how we take the new technology for granted, by considering that word processors and fax machines were only introduced into law firms, along with other organizations, during the 1980s. Before then, letters and documents were prepared using electric or manual typewriters and took a day or longer to deliver by first-class mail; technical information, such as law reports, legal forms, and statutes were obtained from consulting books and visiting law libraries.

Many believe that recent productivity gains are only the first stage in a continuing revolution. High volume fields, such as land title conveyancing, wills, commercial transactions, and personal injury, have already been computerized. Enthusiasts argue that all legal work will eventually be managed through customized software packages. Another development is litigation support software in which documents are scanned into a searchable database. Advocates claim that this not only reduces the time spent in discovery of evidence, but also allows lawyers to identify key issues or patterns that were not possible through reading paper files. Many courts in the United States and Great Britain have made steps towards computerization, so one can file documents electronically.

Case management software allows parties to exchange information about lists and to change a plea that would previously have taken place in directions hearings. E-mail, the Internet, and cheap databases on CD-ROM, make it possible to work from home. Finally, the mobile phone and portable e-mailers, such as the Blackberry, have changed the way professionals work. There are, for example, lawyers in London who speak to their clients and assistants by telephone while negotiating traffic on their way to the office.

Richard Susskind argues that “beyond automating and streamlining traditional ways of providing legal advice…information technology… will eventually help re-engineer the entire legal process and result in a major change in the predominant ways that legal services are delivered and justice is administered” (1996: 2–3). He believes that there are “countless instances in domestic and business life that would benefit from legal input but where this has been impractical or too costly to achieve in the past” (1996: 268). In the future, many legal products will become available through the Web, while lawyers offer new high-value services from their offices. Similarly, Ethan Katsh argues that many kinds of disputes will be resolved in cyberspace, allowing courts to concentrate on more difficult or technical cases. These writers do not see technology as a threat to law firms, but an opportunity for expansion, provided one embraces the new paradigm.

By contrast, other commentators have presented technological change in a darker light. David Wall and Jennifer Johnstone argue that case management systems result in de-skilling: they allow “a firm to take on many more personal injury cases than before by using cheaper non-lawyers, thus reducing overheads and raising profits” (1997: 109). From this perspective, lawyers are not freed from routine tasks to pursue more interesting work, but are forced to type their own letters once secretarial support has been removed. Tele-supported home working does not provide a better work-life balance for employees but creates heavily monitored sweatshops hidden from the client (the legal equivalent of call centers). Digital dictation does not provide a cheaper or quicker service, but a means of reducing staff through exploiting low-paid workers in the developing world.

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