Anyone who knows me will not be surprised by the subject of my inaugural President’s Message. I have long been an advocate for the use of information technology in the practice of law. From the relative obscurity of rural Western Colorado, I have traveled to such places as London, Honolulu, Toronto, and St. Croix to speak on various subjects within the broad topic of information technology and the practice of law. Maybe one message on this theme will be enough during my term as CBA President; maybe not. Time will tell.

Technology 101

My involvement with computers began in law school when I bought an original Mac. It had no hard disk drive. I bought the extra floppy drive so that we (I shared the computer with my wife Mary Jane) could put an application in one drive and our working file in the other.

After law school, I joined a firm that had bought new computers a couple of years earlier. A few years later, when that firm dissolved and I became half-owner with the remaining partner, we learned we needed to upgrade. It seems our predecessors had bet on CP/M becoming the prevailing operating system instead of MS-DOS.

In the mid-’80s, computers generally were within the exclusive domain of support staff. In our case, our assistants were the only people in the office who knew anything about using the computers we had. That struck me as impractical. It took only a few years in practice for me to realize that jury instructions were written on weekends or evenings, and major briefs or contracts were completed in the wee hours—precisely those times when support staff are living lives and young attorneys are not. The way to fix this, I reasoned, was for me to learn how to use these glorified typewriters. (Oh, I knew how to type; my mother had seen to that while I was in high school.)

When the time came to buy the new computers, I told my partner that I intended to observe the installation and setup with an eye toward gaining a basic understanding of how they worked. I was thinking along the lines of learning how to turn them on and off, and maybe—just maybe—how to create and print a document. Lofty goals, indeed! I learned that using Word Star to produce simple documents was like using an eighteen-wheeler to deliver newspapers door-to-door. Then I discovered WordPerfect 5.1!

Lawyers as Information Workers

It began to make sense for attorneys to compose and draft their own documents using a good word processing application. Early on, though, personal computers had not matured to devices proficient at storing, organizing, and retrieving information. Access to Westlaw® and Lexis® was painstakingly slow and outrageously expensive, and the search tools were just plain hard to use. This was all about to change.

As personal computers matured, terms like “information age,” “information economy,” and “information super highway” began to appear in the news and popular press. The devices we originally envisioned to crunch numbers were able to do much more. As devices that could store, organize, sort, and retrieve information, personal computers were about to change the practice of law. Lawyers were becoming, in the lexicon of the day, the quintessential “information workers.”

The Business of Practicing Law

Jump ahead, from the early 1990s to the second decade of the 21st century. The digital evolution continues. Today, most lawyers and law firms use a variety of information technologies to conduct the business of practicing law. Some lawyers and law firms use more; some use less. The specific applications are not as important as bringing information technology to bear on various aspects of the professional and business components of practicing law.

What are the professional and business components of practicing law? I like to think of the professional components as including research, writing, and the delivery of work product, and the business components as including billing, bookkeeping, and calendaring. After dividing the typical law practice into these components, we can look at how information technology can be brought to bear on each aspect of a law practice.

Billing and Bookkeeping

In a law practice, billing and bookkeeping are areas where electronic information technology has made paper almost—if not entirely—obsolete. This was one of the first aspects of the practice to “go digital.” The billing piece often includes the electronic recording of time spent on matters, using applications such as TABS, TimeSlips, PCLaw, or Billing Matters. Those time entries are silently and efficiently tallied by the hardware–software time and billing system. Then, at the end of the month, this office system generates the bills. After the bills have been sent, most of these applications can be used to apply payments received on client accounts.

These applications typically provide for trust accounting and can be used to transfer payments from trust to business accounts. Most, but not all, of these applications can be used to manage the business checking account. Some include modules that provide payroll functions. In the spirit of full disclosure, let it be known that I am numerically challenged, and billing and bookkeeping are areas that I try to avoid. So let’s go to another aspect of the business component—calendaring.

New Millennium Calendars

There’s more to calendaring than calendars. I’m told that Microsoft Outlook has a very nice calendar feature, but I’ve never used it. Don’t get me wrong, Outlook beats a paper calendar hands down; I just prefer a calendar that has been designed for use by legal professionals.¹ Such calendars usually are one component of what are referred to as “practice management applications.” The big players in this market are Amicus Attorney, Practice Master, Pro Law, and Time Matters.²

Generally speaking, practice management applications focus information around cases or matters. Information can be focused around contacts, but matter-centric organization is the prevailing method. In practice management applications, records are created for each matter handled by the firm. Then, other records created in the application are linked or related to the matter. For example, let’s say you have a matter that you call Smith v. Jones. You can associate contact records with that matter. Contact records would be your address book; however, if I am opposing counsel, I’m not just a name in your address book—you associate me with the matter. The same goes for other contacts that might be associated with the matter, including the client, opposing party, judge, referral source, and co-counsel. Most practice management applications allow you to customize the records so you can create as many relationship categories as your practice may require. That’s not all!

The calendar in a practice management application can link events to matters. Events are occurrences—things you attend, not deadlines. As event entries are made on the calendar, they can be linked to the appropriate matter. Deadlines are typically represented by “to-do” records—that is, the application has a form to complete that includes:

• the due date
• as many reminders as you want
• the type of deadline (in my firm, we keep it simple: there are internal deadlines for things we have to do and external deadlines for things people outside the firm have to do)
• the subject or what it is you have (or someone else has) to do
• to whom it is due
• enough customizable fields to satisfy the needs of the most compulsive practitioner.

Of course, deadlines or to-do records are linked to matter records. That means that you can go to the main matter record and see all of the events and to-do items that are associated with that matter.

Making and Creating Notes and E-mail Applications

Practice management applications do more than connect the dots between matters, people, events, and deadlines. Most include tools for making notes that can be associated with a matter. Likewise, most include a special tool for creating notes for telephone calls. No more of those little pink “While You Were Out” notepads to be lost or misplaced. There are other “special” records that these applications offer that can be linked or associated with matters, but the most valuable feature, in my opinion, is the ability to link electronic mail messages to specific matters.

E-mail has become a generally accepted mode of communication. Practice management applications allow you to connect e-mail messages to matters. When messages are connected to matters, they can be removed from the in-box. When matters are closed, the e-mail message records are included in the archive.

Legal Research

The move to electronically based legal research was essentially forced on many Colorado lawyers. Local law libraries—no longer supported by the state judicial branch—closed. Few, if any, counties can afford to maintain such libraries. That means if you want to look at an ALR annotation or a case from the Southeastern Reporter, you either find it online or travel to the Front Range to use hard copies in libraries there.

As local law libraries began closing in large numbers, the CBA stepped up and offered the Casemaker legal research library as a free benefit to its members.³ Initially, Casemaker provided most of what most lawyers needed—basic statutes and about fifty years of case law. Today, Casemaker is a much more robust research tool that effectively competes with LexisNexis and Westlaw. Regardless of which research tool a lawyer uses, though, the fact remains that electronically based research has become the norm for most lawyers.

It’s a Digital World

The systems that most law firms use to create documents went digital before the turn of the century. I expect there are very few lawyers who do not use a computer and software to prepare documents. Even if the lawyer does not do the drafting at the keyboard, he or she has staff with computer skills. Just as you likely would not hire an accountant who still uses a manual adding machine, clients likely will not employ lawyers who still use typewriters and carbon paper.

E-Filing and the Paperless Office

If most lawyers are in fact preparing documents digitally, then why would they bother to convert them from electronic media to paper for storage? This question becomes more perplexing when you consider that most courts have mandated electronic filing. In the Colorado Judicial Branch’s January 2010 list of “Mandatory E-Filing Courts,” only one district out of twenty-two⁴—the Ninth Judicial District—was not included. Think about it: in 2010, all documents in any given case were most likely electronically prepared and filed with the court.

Electronic Client Files

The courts are storing documents electronically and so should lawyers. The federal court uses the acronym “ECF” for Electronic Court Files. Lawyers should have our own version of ECF, meaning Electronic Client Files. When client files are stored electronically, they can be replicated on portable media and removed from the law office. In other words, you can back up your client files and take them anywhere you want. Floods, fires, tornados, and other disasters pose little or no threat to client files that exist on a variety of media in various locations. Access to electronic files can be secured as well as, if not better than, their paper counterparts. (However, like non-archive quality paper records, storage media can degrade over time, so a variety of media should be used.) Additionally, electronic client files can be accessed more efficiently than paper files and cost far less to store. More efficient and costs less—sounds promising.

Work-Product Delivery

The final component to consider in the professional law practice is how lawyers deliver their work product. As mentioned above, for those who file documents with courts, the preferred—if not mandatory—method of delivery has become electronic. Traditional written-on-paper work product, such as attorney–client and attorney–attorney communications, frequently are delivered electronically. When the substance of the communication requires more formality than e-mail, many lawyers prepare traditional letters or memoranda that are delivered electronically.

Live presentations of information often are enhanced through the use of electronic information technology. Trials with electronically presented evidence move more quickly and are easier for all participants to follow. Complex matters can be explained to clients more effectively using a digital projector and presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint. The trend of delivering information electronically, whether in static documents or live presentations, certainly will continue.

Electronic Information Technology—Here to Stay

Many lawyers and law firms make good use of electronic information technology. Many more could improve their bottom lines and the service provided to clients by making better use of technology. The tools for working with information will continue to evolve. How we find the law and where we find it will continue to change. The technology we use today will become the mimeograph and carbon paper of tomorrow. In the meantime, courts and clients will continue to insist that we deliver our work product in the most efficient and effective ways. Legal professionals need to stay in step with the evolution of information technology.

Notes

1. See www.tabs3.com/press_articles/practice-management_whitepaper.pdf.
2. All of these applications were developed by small companies. Today, LexisNexis owns Time Matters (and PCLaw and Billing Matters), and West owns Pro Law. Amicus still is owned by Gavel & Gown Software, and Practice Master remains the property of its developer, Software Technology, Inc. (which also owns TABS).
3. Casemaker is available through the CBA home page at www.cobar.org. CBA members who have questions may call Reba Nance at (303) 860-1115 or toll-free in-state, (800) 332-6736.
4. See www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/File/Mandatory%20E-File%20Courts%202010.pdf.

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