ABA Techshow 99

By Alan Gahtan - Law Times, April 1999

Each year the American Bar Association's Law Practice Management Section presents its 3 day Techshow in Chicago which focuses on the use of technology in the practice of law. The objective is to educate legal professionals and law firm MIS directors on how technology can be used to reduce cost and improve service delivery. For the regular attendees, it provides a place to meet old friends and hear about the latest technology.

As has been the practice for the last 4-5 years, Techshow 99 included a session on the discovery and use of electronic evidence (the term in the industry is Electronic Media Discovery or EMD). Jim Michalowicz of DuPont confirmed the growing importance of the topic. During the last 5 years, the proportion of discovery requests received by his company which specifically mentioned information in electronic form, particularly e-mail, jumped from 2% to over 30%. Lawyers are increasingly going after electronic evidence and courts are increasingly granting sanctions against parties that fail to properly preserve and disclose it.

This year's conference, which took place March 18th-20th, included over 100 exhibitors. Notably absent were any vendors of standalone document assembly software. While vendors of pre-packaged document assembly applications appear to be doing well, there appears to be a growing recognition that most law firms are not finding it cost effective to develop their own applications.

In keeping with the technology focus, the primary mode of distribution for the conference materials was CD-ROMs. However, three thick paper versions were available at extra cost for those that preferred the old way.

For some years now, Techshow has included topics related to the use of technology in the courtroom. This year was no exception. Not only were there sessions on this topic during almost every time slot, but this year's conference featured a replica of Courtroom 21, a multimedia-capable mock courtroom located at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law of the College of William & Mary.

Voice-dictation was discussed in a number of the sessions. While some of the current products from Dragon, IBM and others have been optimized for use with certain word processing programs, they are of limited utility with other programs. In the near future we are likely to see voice dictation built directly into, and tightly integrated with law office software such as case management systems. Also, the accuracy of voice dictation programs is continuing to improve as the vendors continue to develop better language models (which allow words to be recognized in context rather than discretely).

There was also discussion about the use of digital dictation services such as Cyberspeak and the Speech Machine. To use such services, a lawyer calls a toll-free number and dictates using the telephone handset. The dictation is then transcribed and the document sent to the lawyer by e-mail.

A session on forging a hot site on the Net featured Greg Siskind as a speaker. Greg has created the most popular immigration site on the Internet and now generates over 70% of his business from the Net. Over 300 of his competitors have noticed and have also created immigration oriented sites. Greg is therefore continually working to stay one step ahead.

Greg's latest initiative is a related Web site called VisaJobs which is the first web site dedicated to finding employment for foreign nationals wishing to live and work in the United States. In order to advertise, employers must certify that they are willing to file a visa petition for a qualified employee.

One of the most popular and entertaining sessions was "50 Gadgets in 60 Minutes". This session featured four of the legal community's most obsessed gadget fanatics who demonstrated their collection of the most useful, and the most useless, gadgets for lawyers and their staff.

A number of sessions dealt with use of the Internet to facilitate the practice of law. There is a recognition that e-mail has become so central to the practice of law that an interruption can have serious consequences. A number of large firms, including Chicago's Mayer Brown & Platt have implemented monitoring software which sends test messages and monitors response times. Support staff are then quickly notified in the event of a problem.

Almost all firms recognize the importance of the Internet and have provided their lawyers with desktop access to the Web. Many have found that giving their secretaries web access has allowed them to save money by canceling certain print subscriptions. Early concerns that staff may spend the day surfing to inappropriate sites have largely turned out to be overblown.

A number of firms are beginning to experiment with the next step - document collaboration across the Net. Some are using group collaboration tools built into Web browsers. Others are exploring the use of Internet-accessible document management systems.

The Word versus WordPerfect issue came up at some sessions. The client service oriented firms are adopting the principle that law firms should deliver their product to clients in the format the client wants or uses. While WordPerfect continues to be the preferred choice of smaller firms, most of the larger firms have switched or are in the process of switching to Word in order to better serve their corporate clients who are predominently using Word. Firms that are staying with WordPerfect as their corporate standard are taking a very permissive attitude towards the use of Word in the firm.

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