from the New York Times
March 30, 1998
Law Firms Turn to Technology
To Manage the Information Explosion
By GEANNE ROSENBERG
I n the not-so-distant past, casebook-laden lawyers crowded law
firm libraries, a secretary sat stationed outside nearly every
office door and messengers frequented the corridors.
Now, a recent midday tour of Davis Polk & Wardwell's library netted
not one associate. A single secretary often serves three lawyers,
intraoffice communications travel by e-mail, and computers, not
humans, put numbers on documents.
These are the more visible changes that computerization and the
Internet have wrought in the practice of law. And changes in the
way information is collected, organized and retrieved are
transforming the practice of law itself, not just reducing the
grunt work.
"Where there are those who have been using technology for a few
years, they're light years ahead of the troglodytes and Luddites,"
said Daniel S. Coolidge, chairman of the computer and technology
subcommittee at the American Bar Association and partner in charge
of the intellectual property law practice at Sheehan Phinney Bass &
Green in Manchester, N.H.
"These people who've said, 'I'm too old to learn the technology' --
they're just being left behind," he said.
Much of law practice consists of gathering and organizing facts,
cases and statutes or communicating with clients and adversaries.
Information technology is increasingly intertwined in all of these
activities.
And to some extent, information technology in law practice is
self-perpetuating: the explosion of e-mail and sheer storage space
that computerization provides is making computers a virtual
necessity to sift, retrieve and process massive quantities of
documents.
Some of the software used by the firms is bought off the shelf;
Davis Polk uses mass-produced software, costing about $100 a copy,
to support retrieval of its standard-form documents. But scanning
software is also marketed directly to law firms by specialty
developers, at prices from $1,000 to $300,000.
In some cases, law firms' substantial information trafficking is
placing them in the vanguard of technology, prompting them to
invent new resources and solutions in-house. One law firm -- Wilson
Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, Calif. -- patented software
it developed to allocate printers on the firm's network.
Fulbright & Jaworski, a law firm in Houston, developed a law-firm
accounting software program in the 1980s, which it marketed to
several large firms. Mark Horak, Fulbright's manager of technology,
said, however, that the firm abandoned the business in 1990 because
it could not do the customization its customers wanted.
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Technology had really changed everything across the board. It
changes how we communicate with our clients, with other lawyers and
in some cases how we communicate with the court.
Joel M. Cohen, litigation partner at Davis Polk
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But few, if any, firms have made a more concerted effort to develop
a state-of-the-art technology infrastructure than Davis Polk.
Michael Mills, a former bankruptcy lawyer, has been at the head of
that effort. Mills, who learned to program computers as an
undergraduate at Reed College, worked at Davis Polk early in his
career and ended up as chairman of Mayer, Brown & Platt's computer
committee. In 1990, Davis Polk rehired him -- not as a practicing
lawyer, but to lead the development of an information and
technology system at the firm. Now he serves as director of
professional services and systems at Davis Polk.
Among the technology-related resources Mills has assembled are a
full-text index of all of the firm's internal memos and
work-product spanning the last 18 years, "so every bit of the
firm's intellectual capital is available online" on the firm's
network, he said. There is also a database into which all of the
firm's court papers are scanned.
In addition, the firm created software to track information on the
Internet daily and bring it to the firm's desktops. With it, the
firm is amassing its own database of Securities and Exchange
Commission filings involving potential Year 2000 computer problems.
The Year 2000 problem is an issue many companies need to address in
corporate filings, and lawyers drafting such provisions often are
interested in how other companies have handled the issue.
Davis Polk is also developing hyperlinks to documents that have
been placed in evidence, so that a lawyer reading an online
deposition can click onto an exhibit number to get an image of the
actual exhibit.
The Internet itself has proven a valuable tool for legal research.
Michael Barclay, a partner at Wilson Sonsini in Palo Alto, used to
hire private investigators to find information. Now he logs on.
In a patent infringement case against his client, Barclay found
evidence on a corporate Web site that helped force a settlement.
"We're talking about a real weapon here to really make litigation
efficient and productive," Barclay said.
Joel M. Cohen, a litigation partner at Davis Polk, said technology
had "really changed everything across the board. It changes how we
communicate with our clients, with other lawyers and in some cases
how we communicate with the court."
But, although some federal courts in New York, including the
Eastern District and the bankruptcy court in the Southern District,
have begun pilot projects for electronic filings, most judges are
not online.
And even in-house, implementing new technology is not without its
risks. As Davis Polk began expanding its use of scanning technology
for document production there came a point when the system just
stopped: Last year, lawyers had just completed their on-screen
review of documents and were printing out the results of hundreds
of hours of legal work on a Saturday to meet a Monday deadline when
the software directing the printer failed.
Although "it was pretty harrowing" under the deadline pressure,
Mills said that a solution was found: increasing the number of
documents the system was programmed to print.
There are more subtle risks. Because clients can send and receive
documents to and from their lawyers through e-mail and faxes, they
tend to expect instant answers. Sometimes, lawyers say, they long
for the days when they had more time to ruminate about problems, or
to respond to clients' questions.
In addition, with fewer face-to-face meetings, Robert Jay Levine, a
corporate partner at Davis Polk, said, "It makes it harder to find
opportunities to cement personal relationships."
Security is also a serious concern for law firms. At Sullivan &
Cromwell, according to Jack Bostelman, a corporate partner, there
are separate work-stations for Internet access not connected to the
firm's computer network.
Wilson Sonsini hires an outside Internet security specialist to
handle its information system security.
The technological advances have leveled the playing field in that
lawyers who cannot afford well-stocked libraries have relatively
inexpensive access to the information they need. But the technology
still gives larger and more established firms an edge.
Levine said: "The great thing we have to offer people is the
collective knowledge and experience that we have. What we're
becoming increasingly able to do is to harness that and bring it to
bear more efficiently" to new problems and situations.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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