Click here to listen to the presentation given at TechShow '98
Chicago, IL March 26 and 28, 1998
Samuel A. Guiberson
I don’t believe necessarily that every two cases are alike and hence they need to be supported the same way. Litigation is a stream and you never put you hand into the same lawsuit in the same way. You don’t grab the same fish twice. So, the key element in being effective in your litigation support is being flexible. Only taking software off the shelf and putting it together the way you know to put it together best to suit your individual needs is going to succeed in giving you the tools you need to try lawsuits in the way that you think is best. I think that we ought to at least allow for the possibility that each case presents new opportunities to us that are not the same as the last case we may have done and also, I don’t think any two lawyers try the same case the same way.
There is some virtue in trying to consolidate all aspects of the single lawsuit into one big front-end, a footprint you might say and just for the sake of argument, I've built one. Some people truly prefer, and I don’t want to deny them, the opportunity to visualize their lawsuit as one front-end. And to analyze how they proceed through the work that trial is toward the conclusion, a natural progression, in this case a criminal case, from the beginning of the process through to the end. If you want to take that approach build it yourself; design it yourself for your own personal needs.
We’ve put together a few basics here, let me see, it's simple. Every part of the litigation has its own database where we store information and obviously we connect to different aspects of the litigation, different parts if the evidence, by linking. In this instance, it is possible for us, in a case that might involve a lot of electronic surveillance, to link directly from the master database to the computer wave file, the audio file, that would allow that evidence to be played. So, we do use this device to provide us with a master access to all different aspects of the case. You know you hear a lot about calendaring and how that’s a necessary function, and of course it is. But, you could do this yourself. You don’t have to have every programmer in the western world working away for you. This is nothing but a WordPerfect calendar connected to the Access database. Very much do it yourself, but very much effective too. Again I’ve combined every conceivable element just to show you that you can consolidate all kinds of diverse components in a lawsuit into one simple database. Yes, of course it is true that you need some skills to work in this medium. But they're not skills that take you very long to acquire and if one or two people in the office can acquire them; you have an onboard capacity to do wondrous things in house without spending any money down the road.
However, I think a lot of us truly underestimate the potential for something as down right dog simple as the Windows interface itself for organizing information relating to trial. I want to be sure that when I have a law suit that I may be sharing work product with other firms and other individuals that I provide a means by which they can reach the information they need with a minimum of learning curve. So, I simply design, redesign the menu on the start menu so that instead of reaching particular applications, it reaches particular resources of the litigation. It's absolutely simple to do.
Now, to go beyond simplicity. What we are going to see, and I think this is obvious to everybody in the room that if you’re going to talk about a generic application, which everybody you will be working with will understand how to work, you talk about the browser, the Web browser. I think your going to see, its no fearsome prediction, a migration of all litigation support to a web-server-based operation. That's what we're doing. We work in conjunction with law firms all over the country, what we have to do is provide a common web server for each litigation support project that we're a part of. So that we, the server and the web browser and the web pages become the access point for all the information in the case. And just to show you a few quick examples of how one might do that; lets say your managing tiff files. We've OCR'd a zillion documents and we want to track them. We simply create web pages, which allow you to access the individual information at the document level. In this case I think they are not even HTML they're simply tiffs. So we create web pages which simply catalogue all the documents in a particular file, then produce a web server file structure that allows us to access these documents through web browsers, both on site but also remotely. I could have a team that's spread all over the continental United States accessing documents without knowing a stitch about the software applications that generate them or in which they would ultimately they would be created in which they were created.
Exhibit photos. You know, there is an extension of this into trial applications. If you simply catalogue your exhibit photos or photos in the case into a web page you can use this same vehicle as a display tool. So you could use web pages to catalogue large numbers of images as well as documents. And of course a find feature would enable you to search on the title in the index of documents. So, it becomes a ready-made tool for organizing large numbers of images.
All the exhibits that have been introduced exist in a web browser and they're available to display to the jury with the simplest tool imaginable, one that's free. So, by using the browser motif, to organize litigation support you get the ease and accessibility of an application everybody knows and you get the flexibility of being able to extend that to extranet environments well beyond the walls of your law firm. And that is the future as I see it. Again, it is never, your success in litigation support is never going to be measured by how much cash or how much complexity you can apply to the situation. It is always going to be measured by how effective you can be with the tools you can afford on behalf of your client and nothing more than these simple aids that I've shown you today is necessary to try cases that may be as large as we ever see.
Thank you.
