Local attorney Peter Lacouture has seen the standard for speedy legal correspondence evolve from first class mail to overnight shipping to facsimile machines to e-mail in the last 20 years. He remembers well the days when it could take a week or more to draft and revise legal documents on a typewriter and get them to opposing counsel by mail. Then it often took another week or more to receive the other lawyer’s response.
“Now, with e-mail, you can go back and forth a half-dozen times in a day,” said Lacouture, a partner in Nixon Peabody LLP’s Providence office and chairman of the Rhode Island Bar Association’s technology committee.
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Technology clearly has transformed the way Americans do their jobs in the last decade, but local attorneys said many of their colleagues have been slow to join the Information Age and often had to be nudged along the way by computer-savvy clients.
Matthew Harrington, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Roger Williams University’s Ralph R. Papitto School of Law, has noticed a divide developing between younger lawyers who generally are comfortable with computers and the over-40 set who often aren’t.
“You’ll still run into some lawyers who are dictating briefs into a Dictaphone,” Harrington said.
The chairman of the state bar association’s technology committee is one of them.
“I dictate most everything I do,” Lacouture said. As with many attorneys, it is a lack of familiarity with the keyboard not the computer chip that keeps him from fully embracing computers in his practice.
“I’ve been dictating for over 25 years, and I can revise a draft and get it out faster than I can type,” he conceded. “The heavy-duty power typing is something that I’m not real good at.”
But Lacouture is no legal Luddite. He uses e-mail and the Internet and has been experimenting with cutting-edge voice recognition software to put a 21st-century spin on his preference for dictation. As voice recognition technology improves to the point that conversational speech can be accurately reproduced as words on the computer screen, Lacouture expects more and more lawyers to warm up to computers.
Meanwhile, though, clients are likely to continue insisting that their attorneys to get plugged in.
“The technology is available, and our clients expect us to be proficient in the technology,” said Robert Duffy, a partner in the Providence firm Duffy & Sweeney LLP. “Lawyers are pushed to achieve efficiencies that they didn’t have to achieve five years ago in terms of speed.”
Roger Williams University’s Harrington puts the problem facing stubbornly old school lawyers and firms this way: “If you’re working for IBM, your client is most likely going to say, ‘Give me your e-mail address, and I’ll send this over to you,’ ” he said. “If your response is, ‘I don’t have an e-mail address’ or ‘I don’t know how to do that,’ then that begins, I think, to worry a client.”
Some courts across the country have begun to accept electronic filing of legal briefs and pleadings. But the technological push in the legal profession doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for traditional legal skills anymore.
Although online legal databases have become a popular tool for legal research, Harrington says Roger Williams University law students first are taught to do legal research the old fashioned way — in a library, that is — because the online databases only scratch the surface of the hundreds of years of cases contained in dusty, leather-bound volumes.
The popular Westlaw legal database, for example, only contains selected Rhode Island Supreme Court cases since the 1940s and none from before then.
“You have to remind law students and lawyers that the computer is no substitute for the books,” Harrington said. “We have hundreds of years of cases kept in books that are never going to be on the computer.”
And lawyers in some smaller firms may not have access to the pricey online legal databases.
“Every student and every lawyer needs to know how to go back through the digests and use the books,” he said. “I cannot see a point in time where we can do without the library.”
Some things, it seems, never change.
