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Imagine: No Fax Machines
It's not hard to do. Visionaries foresee legal documents soon zipping invisibly through the air with the greatest of ease.
By Francis X. Gilpin
Associate Editor
No business will benefit more from the revolution in imaging technology than the business of law.
"Lawyers sell paper, words on paper," says Seminole technology consultant Deborah C. Foster, perhaps summing up the output of a legal office a bit too glibly for some attorneys. "That's what their product is."
So when Canon USA Inc. sells something called a DR-2080C for about $600, imaging technology consultant Kevin M. Makar says law firm administrators should sit up and take notice. That's because the machine will scan 20 two-sided color documents in about a minute, says Makar.
But the beauty of new imaging gadgets lies in how legal professionals can organize and store documents for easy and instantaneous retrieval later on, including from outside of the office.
Electronic-filing mandates from courts are becoming the rule across the nation, making scanners required equipment in legal offices for lawyers who have to attach exhibits to motions. Pretty soon, wireless broadband will be available on portable devices so traveling lawyers can dispatch pleadings to the courthouse from anywhere.
Scott Bassett, a lawyer and technology consultant, finds a little irony in what is happening. While more lawyers are using devices such as palmOne Inc.'s Treo 600, a personal digital assistant/mobile Internet provider/cellular telephone/digital camera combination, the federal courthouse in Tampa bars all portable electronic appliances on visitors to the premises.
"They're pioneering the concept of e-filing," says Bassett, but "anything beyond a quill pen seems to be too much [to carry in] for the federal courts."
Forward-thinking law office managers are trying to do better. They're going beyond just scanning official records. Foster, who is president of InTouch Business Consultants Inc., says some firms are scanning all of their incoming snail mail and archiving the correspondence on their office server.
Bassett says the technology magazines to which he subscribes are full of potential applications for the modern law office. But he adds: "There's a lot available now that law firms are not using."
Daniel R. Walbolt Jr., president and chief executive of a St. Petersburg litigation support company called Best Evidence Inc., says lawyers might be somewhat justified in their restraint.
"Putting 10,000 documents on a CD-ROM, are you really that much better off than having 10,000 documents in boxes?" asks Walbolt, whose parents are both lawyers. "I mean, you can view them on a plane trip, I guess, but you can't really analyze them."
There are two crying needs in law office technology, according to Walbolt.
The first need is software that mimics the way lawyers and their support personnel have always worked. Too much of what's on the market was developed by software engineers working in a vacuum who expect legal professionals to adapt to their new way of doing a task. "They're being driven by the technology, not the clients," says Walbolt.
The second need is products that will allow lawyers to collaborate intelligently over any platform from anyplace. "Go to a big deposition and see what happens during a break," says Walbolt. "Every attorney is out in the hall, thumbing away on their BlackBerry. They don't call them 'CrackBerries' for nothing."
Yet Walbolt sees precious few gee-whiz devices that are truly fulfilling either need. "There's products that say they do, but they really don't," he says. "It's not rocket science. Somebody should be able to do it."
Some lawyer-friendly geek probably will.
For instance, Walbolt thinks it won't be too long before there is software that will let lawyers, after scanning their 10,000 records into a retrieval program, search out the closest thing to a "smoking gun" document to make their case. Or at least make it easier for them to see patterns in a pile of data.
"You want to see relationships. You want something that can search for more than a date field," says Walbolt. "And you should be able to access it without being a database guy. You have to be a regular guy."
Any store-and-search system for attorneys should be flexible and designed with collaboration in mind.
"Lawyers are not just dealing with documents, 8 1/2 by 11[-inch] pieces of paper," says Walbolt. "There are photos to consider, e-mails with metadata, Excel spreadsheets, animation clips, you-name-it."
Legal teams - extending across offices, firms and even continents - will be able to work simultaneously on drafts of briefs in cyberspace someday, says Walbolt. If the team isn't working in real time, electronic documents will have the capacity to embed the critique of, say, the real estate practitioner so the tax expert later has the benefit of the previous viewer's comments.
"You're building a knowledge base that stays with that document," says Walbolt.
Walbolt says senior lawyers, like other business owners, are going to have to get comfortable with application service providers. These outsource vendors deliver remote universal access to individualized software and data over the Internet at much lower cost than a business can maintains its own IT department for, says Walbolt.
ASPs have been unfairly maligned, in Walbolt's opinion, especially by cautious Old Economy types. "That's a conceptual bias," he says. Executives who think their work applications and proprietary data are more secure on their office server than an ASP's Web site kid themselves, he says. They're both out on the Internet, notes Walbolt, equally vulnerable to hackers without the right protection.
A possible intermediate step that Foster recommends to her clients is ProDoc Inc. The Texas company offers every conceivable legal form that any attorney would have to have to practice in either the Lone Star State or Florida. Monthly online subscriptions are available for less than $100.
"It's ridiculous," Foster says of the efficiency and savings.
Walbolt also predicts vendors will soon be able to provide law offices with module software and only charge for the features that attorneys and paralegals must have.
"I consider myself a pretty tech-savvy guy and I'm befuddled by some of this stuff," says Walbolt. He cites the Word word-processing program, which Microsoft Corp. boasts can complete more than 7,000 different tasks.
"Personalized solutions without having to buy from a custom vendor," Walbolt calls it.
In the end, ease of use is critical, says Makar, president of Aridine Inc. in Wesley Chapel.
Makar uses Optical Character Recognition and bar-code technologies to create user-friendly software for professions and industry. After installation and a brief training session for workers learning his Web-based Infusion program, Makar says: "The first thing that comes out of their mouth is usually, 'Is that it? Is that all I have to do?'
"If it takes us more than 10 or 15 minutes to train somebody how to use the system, it's gone too far," says Makar.
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