Remembering the Magic of Supreme Court Briefs Before Technology Took Over

I started working in Big Law in 1980, right when large law firms were at the tail end of using centralized mini-computers with dumb terminals spread throughout the firm. Every few days, we would receive memos (hand-carried by an in-house messenger - there was no form of email or instant messaging then) asking us to fill out a form telling the IT staff which of our computer documents no longer needed to be stored on the central system. The firm had to continually delete old documents to free up storage space. I imagine that it could have added storage capacity but the cost at the time was very high. On the software side, there was no mass market software available and the software we used was a proprietary system of very limited functionality that came with the Wang system.

This piece (which is extremely well-written, by the way) reminded me of how we used to do redlining of legal documents in that era. No software was available to do this automatically or in any kind of expedited fashion. Therefore, to show, e.g., what changes had been made to a contract from the last cycle, attorneys would line up printed versions of the contracts side-by-side, with the old draft on the left and the new on the right. With a ruler in hand, they would go down the left side line-by-line while manually comparing it to the contract on the right. If they came upon a deletion, they would use a pen to cross out the relevant language as a way of showing that deletion in the new draft. For an insertion, they would hand-write the insertion in the margin or at the bottom of the new draft and hand-draw a line/arrow from the point of insertion to the added text (of the text were too long, the new text would be separately typed out, marked as "Insert A" (or whatever was next in sequence), and the contract itself would be marked with an insertion point instructing the reader to "See Insert A." This process would take many hours to do with a lengthy contract and would need to be double- and triple-checked for an important document to avoid the errors that would inevitably mark such a painstakingly detailed process. When the document came back from the other side, this same manual, time-consuming process would be repeated. And so the iterations would continue until the final, execution versions were prepared and signed. Clients were charged for every minute of attorney/paralegal time involved. The results were first-class but hugely expensive to clients. This sort of legal work was done almost exclusively for large, institutional clients. No small business could afford it, as it easily added large legal costs to a negotiation process.

Times have changed indeed. If you just imagine what it would be like to work with no email, no text messaging, no cell phones, no quality software, no internet, no personal computing (other than with "toy" computers) and the like, you will be thankful for the marvelous tools we have today. Among other things, legal services will never be the same.

The law's slowness to adapt to changing technology is a frequent topic of debate at HN. In this case, the changes are literally taking place beneath the judge's noses. I wonder if members of the judiciary consider the changing feel and smell of the papers landing on their desk in relation to the new and complex legal questions argued within their pages.