Using Internet Technology to Construct Your Future Litigation Practice

Sam Guiberson

Law Technology News
May 2000

There was a time in history when the movers and shakers were distinguishable from the unmoving and unshaken because they drew pictures of animals on the cave walls, and the other folks just sat around the fire picking their toes. 

Without overdrawing the comparison between Neanderthals and lawyers, I think we have something to learn from the smart ones.  In their shamanistic culture, the act of drawing an animal being captured or hunted, the act of creating an image of the world as they wanted it to be - in their magical frame of reference - brought that world into being.  The cave drawers weren't making art; they were making their futures.

 We have to use our minds to design the way we use the technology of the present and future, and by doing that, we bring, like the Neanderthals, those animals to life.  That is a conceptual model that can serve us well in our relationship to technology today.  The technology has become so flexible that if we can visualize a way of practicing that we want to make real, we can make it so. 

Despite the dizzying mass production of computers, components, software and every imaginable accessory, the way the commodities are turned to a creative purpose remains a unique, individual experience.  As with humankind, zillions of computers are made from the same material, but no two computers need be used alike. Now you create the way you work.  Your practice is your baby.

The Neanderthals used to draw on the cave walls; we used to write documents within our offices for examination and analysis within the walls of our office.  What has happened to us is no less profound than if the walls of a Neanderthal's cave suddenly turned inside out. 

No longer are our practices inwardly focused.  They are outwardly directed, whether the out we are directing them to is ourselves at other locations, our clients wherever they choose to be, or our partners in litigation across the world.  We must now think in terms of turning outward the information we have always been trained to hold within an organization.  The walls of the mountain we lawyers once hid within have moved  like a second act change of scenery; now we practice on a virtual stage.

All Webs

Practice management is all webs, not just the World Wide Web, but the word wide web and every size and scale of website in between.  Everyone in the firm should be a webpage publisher.  Just as we would think it impossible for a lawyer not to know a word processing program today, no lawyer tomorrow will be able to process words without a webpage publisher. 

Litigation documents have a very short term of individual use and a very long life as part of an inventory of documents, which when taken together, inform us about our past and present cases.  So why not recognize, when we try to model our technology around the way we work, that most of the time we're working with documents as part of a stored group, whether they are stored in a file folder or a webserver? 

When we focus our document management strategy on documents as units of a larger whole, the obvious means of keeping the whole set of documents accessible is the Web. 

Why shouldn't documents be webpages from start to finish?  Working in a web-based framework allows us to rethink litigation support, organizational practices and case management.  We can now imagine very radically different relationships to case information among our partners in practice, our clients and ourselves.

Paint in the Cave

Let me describe how we paint in our cave,  the way we conceive of how the future might work for us in our practice.  We don't think of litigation support and litigation management as two different projects.  We have unified the notion of how we organize to preserve documents for our own review and how we organize documents to prepare for trial.  We have fused those two processes together so that our trial tools are our administrative and organizational tools. 

We design a set of basic litigation management and support components for the web.  Our Internet-borne web litigation support  operates in a secure and dynamically encrypted path from servers in our office. We create generic web components for every conceivable kind of case and for work in every phase of a case from the addresses and telephone numbers to in- court exhibit presentation.  We want our generic litigation support to include every possibility, so that as a case differentiates itself from our generic standard, we simply remove the unneeded components. 

We can feed video, audio and transcripts combined with video and audio to anywhere in the world via our website for review by anybody, anywhere.  We can integrate databases very nicely into a web environment.  We have complete online text retrieval for every type of document in the case. The Web becomes the vessel for fusing the internal and the external work of the legal enterprise. 

Presentation Device

We can use our web-based litigation support  as a trial presentation device as well, so that there is unity between how we prepare a case and how we present it.  The courtroom visual aids, whether schematic drawings, charts or photographs can all be critiqued, composed and ultimately presented from the web litigation support.  There is a benefit that stems from counsel working before the jury with the same presentation tools that they became familiar with while preparing the lawsuit.  The litigator is more natural in digital presentation before the jury if the court technology is the same as the litigation support technology.

Not one, but scores of people can be reviewing trial, office, and public documents in a web-based information system.  It can also be shared in trial conferences and even while exhibits are being introduced and demonstrated before the jury.  As we move into the broadband era of Internet communications, easy-to-stream audio and video and real-time conferencing, the remote presentation of web-based litigation and law office information, whether by a network or the Internet, will seem as if it is running from the computer at hand.

The future of litigation practice lies in applying all that the Web offers us to every aspect of trial practice and case management.