^
I have heard it as you need one days preparation for one hours advocacy.
Northern Piper, thanks for the extended answer. I will try to summarize it for my own clarity and in the battle against ignorance, so correct me if I am wrong.
It sounds like when you are in the court room you need to work with multiple pieces of information, some originating from previous research, some adduced by the opposition and some being both. You generally have this info in the prepared notes (the notes seem to be on paper, though I am not sure from your response) and presumably if your opposition adduces something new, they give you the new documents as printouts.
Perhaps most significantly for the topic of this thread, it appears that the entire organization and integration of the information process is being done inside your head. E.g. AFAIU air traffic controllers organize their plane location and behavior related info either on the original specialized physical maps or using software that emulates that. So from the very start, in a sense, they have had an elaborate user interface to help them keep track of the info they needed to deal with. Similarly, Western staff officers seem to have elaborate map-based software to keep track of a military operation. Accountants seem to have software that keeps track of the entire hierarchy of their financial papers on various levels of detail (or maybe I am idealizing the state of accounting software, having never used it).
Whereas in the lawyer case it appears that the entire underlying model relating the documents is either kept in the lawyer’s head or else, at best, gets jotted down as ad hoc notes, and there is no interest in fitting it into a software app that would “institutionalize” / automate parts of the underlying model of your interaction with the documents and notes. Of course such hypothetical software need not be hard or long to “poke around” - user interfaces can be as efficient or as snafu as the designer makes them.
Incidentally, I am aware of existence (though not any details) of the “electronic discovery” software but that, while an interesting topic in itself, does not directly related to the OP since discovery, of course, is not done in the courtroom. I think we should just have a separate thread for that.
That’s a fair summary, but as I mentioned, I don’t do trials, so trial barristers may have a completely different take on it. My court appearances are rarely more than a day, and often may just be a morning or afternoon, so it’s reasonably easy to keep it all in my head.
Mrs Piper is a trial barrister, specialising in commercial matters, and her cases tend to be document heavy. There is specialised software for keeping documents organized for trial purposes, but I don’t know much about that. Even so, Mrs Piper relies heavily on her personal review of the documents and her personal understanding of how they all fit together. Again, the prep work is done outside of court, usually in the evenings, prepping for a witness, so that she has all the documents she plans to refer to in her exams in chief and cross-exams ready to go when court opens. It would not be very professional if she had to hunt around for key documents during the course of her exams and cross-exams of witnesses.
The modern trend in litigation is as much disclosure as possible, well in advance of trial, to eliminate surprises.
One of the best tools for dealing with large numbers of documents in court is having a junior. In trials or appeals that are document heavy, senior counsel does most of the talking work in general (although juniors do some) and the junior, who typically knows the documents backwards and is not under immediate pressure to speak, can access the documents as the need arises.
Counsel will have organised themselves in advance of any argument or examination or cross-examination of any witness to know what docs counsel want to refer to and roughly in what order. But this is never sufficient because issues always arise on the fly. When they do, and they require reference to a doc not immediately to hand, you lean down to your junior and whisper “Can you get me that receipt from around March 2003 for the 100 widgets where he has scribbled notes on it?” Junior will know what you are talking about and without the pressure to talk will turn it up very quickly. Senior counsel meanwhile, will do a metaphorical soft shoe shuffle till he does.
You can’t do this with software.
In an important sense you are right that the organisational model of the documents is in counsel’s head. This is because each case is so different that it is difficult to imagine any courtroom management software that could cope without being so general as to require great effort to adapt to a particular case. As always, I am prepared to be wrong, but I have never seen any such software that could remove that obligation for the organisation model to be in counsel’s head.
Noel Prosequi, would a wiki with a good search function be a useful first step in developing a flexible, adaptable interface for managing documents and notes as they are being prepared beforehand or else adduced during the proceedings? Or perhaps a wiki that allows more explicit association between various notes and documents than what we are used to in Wikipedia? Plus perhaps a facility to scan handwritten notes and capture them together with their typed up versions? (that is, if the threat of electronic discovery by the opposition does not drive lawyers into the opposite direction of keeping everything on shreddable paper)
Now, granted, wiki interfaces can be quite clunky. So maybe this would have to be a wiki with a more sophisticated user interface that combines sufficient power and “open sezame give me what I want quickly without wasting keystrokes” simplicity.
Code Grey, without prejudice to what Noel Prosequi says,on the issue of during proceedings if you have prepared well for arguments, you will know what document to adduce, at what time and the relevant portion of the same and have listed them separately along with location.
**
“My Lord, the Respondent made multiple Applications on this issue and each were duly considered and rejected on various dates, please turn Annex E on pg 133 of the Trial Bundle, where copies of the applications and replies are attached and if it pleases your Lordship, I will take you through them”…
**
is a lot more persuasive then
**“My Lord many applications were made and denied”…" are they any copies"…“errr yes I think” (shuffles through papers)
**
Point being, that by the time of Oral Arguments you should be prepared and be fully familiar with the case and the brief.
Trying to locate relevant document is something you do in your office the night before and yes a good search function can help, but it is always better to read it your self, easy to miss points otherwise.
I don’t think I can answer that question. We already have systems that turn documents into searchable pdfs and can create typed versions of handwritten documents. The trouble with typed versions of handwritten documents is that the writing is never clean enough to be completely confident of the transcription.
And I am not sure what you mean by “managing” the documents and notes as they are being prepared. Documents of the order of original exhibits (hospital charts, bank records, etc) have to be crawled over painstakingly by counsel, even if they are voluminous. Only a human mind can make relevant connections. A machine-based linking of documents based on the presence of a particular word or phrase is unlikely to be productive by itself. Counsel typically puts interminable hours of preparation into compiling for himself lists, schedules, indexes and so on. Part of the value of this is that the process of creation of these meta documents helps lodge the original documents in his own memory. It familiarises him with them by the process of constantly clawing them.
But these index documents can be hyperlinked to the e-copy of the original documents to which they refer already. I can already examine a witness from a computer screen list I have created as an aid that allows me to bring up immediately a document I want to show a witness by hyperlink.
You may have in mind some idea with which I am not familiar, but I am not seeing any substitute for manually slogging your way through the material. The detail has to be in your head, so that in the moment the witness blurts out unexpectedly “I have never prescribed Fakesamine to a patient” or says “I don’t agree with the proposition that I paid XYZ Co $50,000”, you can say “Yes you did”, turn to your junior and say "“Find me that prescription sheet for Fakesamine to Mrs Jones or Mrs Brown. It’ll be at the back of the hospital chart of one of them.” Junior then digs it up, confirms to himself that it is right and hands up a copy which you shove under the witnesses nose. All this with minimal delay and no risk of a search returning nothing because you mispelled Fakesamine or too much because Fakesamine is a common drug.
I just can’t see much room to simplify much more, given the need for a human memory to manage all this.
Look on the bright side: at least it’s not vi.
The thing is, any useful wiki-like thing that organizes and links a case’s documents together would have to be done manually by a human being; it’s too complicated to be automated. And once someone does go through all the documents and understands how they relate to each other, they won’t need an extensive complete wiki anymore, they’ll probably just need some summary notes and basic organization. So there’s really no point to a wiki system.
On the other hand, there already exist back room document management systems for very extensive and complicated collections – I don’t know much about these, but I assume that since they’ve been around a while, most features that people really find useful have already been added.
One of the assumptions in the OP seems to be that when we’re in the courtroom we’re exploring our own case. That’s not so. We’ve done it all in advance. When we’re in court, we’re past the document finding and organization stages - we’re doing the meat of the law suit - argument about what the documents and evidence mean, and how it relates to the law.
Our job as counsel is to show relationships: to show the relationships between the various facts, the statutes, the cases. That is a highly subjective process. And to do it, we already need to have worked out in our own heads what those relationships are, as Noel Prosequi points out. By the time we go into court, we have to have it all in our heads, to be able to put forward our arguments, rebut the other side’s arguments, and to respond to any questions from the judge or judges. I don’t see a role for software to help me do that.
In U.S. law, attorney work product is privileged, whether it is created on paper on in electronic form. And if something is discoverable, it doesn’t matter whether it’s shreddable, because you can’t destroy evidence.
[QUOTE=code_grey]
E.g. AFAIU air traffic controllers organize their plane location and behavior related info either on the original specialized physical maps or using software that emulates that. So from the very start, in a sense, they have had an elaborate user interface to help them keep track of the info they needed to deal with. Similarly, Western staff officers seem to have elaborate map-based software to keep track of a military operation. Accountants seem to have software that keeps track of the entire hierarchy of their financial papers on various levels of detail (or maybe I am idealizing the state of accounting software, having never used it).
[/QUOTE]
It just occurred to me that all of these examples are dynamic - the situation is changing constantly, and part of the role of software is to update the individual about those changes. So, in the air traffic controller example, if the controller is focussing on Flight 105, he relies on the software to alert him if any other aircraft is getting too close to Flight 105, or to any other aircraft. It could automatically beep a warning if Flight 239 is getting too close. Same with the battle situations, and the accounting situations - the software can be set to certain parameters to alert the decision-maker about changes in the situation that warrant attention.
But that’s not the case in a courtroom. That’s a static situation. The events that are the subject of the lawsuit all occurred long before anyone steps foot in the courtroom, and they aren’t going to change. Same with the law - it’s static at that point. (Of course, well-informed counsel will be aware if there are pending changes to the relevant law in the Legislature, or if there is a case on reserve in the Supreme Court which is relevant and could come down soon.) So you don’t need alerts like in those three examples.
An analogy I’ve heard is that a lawyer is like a salesman, and the judge ain’t buyin your shit. 
Seriously though. Like what Northern Piper said, everything is already known (or should be - if you get surprised in Court, you’re pretty much screwed). So your job is to sell your argument to the judge. Sometimes, your case pretty much sells itself and you don’t need to do anything. Sometimes, your case is a lemon and the judge can smell that stinker miles away.
But judges don’t know everything, and sometimes they miss stuff, they can be convinced. So you try to convince the judge with your logic and your precedents and what have you. But just like a salesman, if opposing counsel throws a curveball at you (so does this thing do oranges?) you have to be right on the ball with the answer (yessir it does, it’s got attachment foo model part 3404 $12.34 WITH tax), and not muddle around with your computer (uhh… let me check my notes).
Can you imagine creating software for a salesman making a sale? That’s a lot more like what software for a lawyer in court would look like. Powerpoints, charts, document lists with quick cross references, stuff to make it easier for the customer (the judge) to understand what you’re selling and why he should buy your stuff and not the stuff that opposing counsel is selling. Not Wikis.
I saw an attorney last week walk up to the podium in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals with nothing but an iPad. No paper, no notes, no folders. It was impressive. He had the transcripts of the trial, the entire record, case law and his notes all organized in a way he could access immediately. (I assume he could, the actual argument didn’t test his ability to dig deep into the memory. Although deep access to notebooks and folders is tough under any circumstances in oral argument)
In trial work, some lawyers use laptops for taking notes or accessing notes,but it’s much rarer than using computers to project documents, video, or animations…
It’s a shame they don’t use Emacs to write all their legal papers in TeX. Then I’d be half-way to being a lawyer.
Most Ohio judges, IME, will now permit lawyers to bring laptops and other gadgets into the courtroom, but it’s up to the individual discretion of the judge or magistrate. (Noisier keys might annoy some crusty old computer-phobic judge, I suppose). I’m aware of no specialized software marketed for use by lawyers inside the courtroom. Most lawyers still take notes by hand, and keep paper documents in binders or folders.
And I know you were kidding, but lawyers who appear before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral argument are permitted to take with them the goose quill pens left on counsel tables as a souvenir of the occasion.
code_grey, now that several lawyers have chimed in and commented on the inquiry, I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on what sort of software options you had in mind? have the answers been helpful?
Tabby Cat’s analogy is very accurate, by the way.
I am fully aware that the preparatory work, document review etc requires a lot of thinking. Human thinking and not any imaginary AI that is really just a way to waste government or Microsoft money on research projects getting nowhere.
Nevertheless, when a human is doing work, the human is taking notes. The human is building, entirely in the mind and partially in the notes, a model interrelating the various artifacts he is dealing with. The notes can be entirely on paper. Or they can be in Notepad. Or they can be in wiki with documents linked to them. Or they can be in some hypothetical very sophisticated CMS which will take years to even spec out but will turn out really useful when built.
Similarly, essays can be written on paper, in Notepad, in Microsoft Word, in MediaWiki and using various other tools (many of which might be hypothetical and not invented/built yet). Discussion of which tool is best in which case does not imply that somehow the essay is written by computer and not by human being.
So my discussion here should be understood as pertaining purely to the tools used by the human lawyer to manage, organize, plan and present his case.
This I could see happening more frequently. Appellate courts are moving more and more to electronic filings of all documents, including the transcripts, authorities and briefs. However, it’s not a specialised software, so far as I can see. Rather, you are required to file in common formats, such as pdf or rtf. Hyperlinks can be included, so a reference in a brief to the case of R. v. Ladue will have a hyperlink that takes you straight to the report of the case in the electronic book of authorities.
Again there needs to be a differentiation between prep and advocacy. During preparation stage if there can be a software that allows me to make a proper Case Note, including a concise summery of facts as well as prepares law point complete with list of authorities and the relevant *ratio *for each, I would love that to bits.
On the other hand, my motto as far as Advocacy is concerned is keep it simple. You have to do it to understand, but during oral arguments you are trying to do multiple things at the same time, such as explaining the background, put forward your own case, impeach the other sides, cover your arguments from rebuttal, gauge what the judge finds important and focus on the same etc etc that IMO (and I could be wrong) having multiple computer program mes or electronic devices running at the same time will only hamper you. It take very little to get the whole thing wrong especially when you are being raked over coals by a Bench, without compounding the issue of having multiple lother things running.