Document Technologies Get Their Day in Court
What do the Unibomber, a US Bankruptcy Court and a New York law firm have in common? They have all turned to document technology to handle mountains of legal paperwork. Imaging, workflow and Java-based Web apps figure in three legal case studies.
By Gordon E.J. Hoke
August 1998
You might not want to hire that personal injury lawyer on TV whose office equipment looks like it dates from the 1960s. The same goes for the bankruptcy attorney with the paper files on his desk. No one wants their lawyer snowed under a pile of paper. Whether you're a plaintiff or a defendent, you want your legal counsel to take advantage of the latest document technologies.
Consultant Anne Kemp, president of Litigation Management Technologies (New Castle, CA 916-663-9591), watched the slow migration of the legal profession to imaging. "The legal community is really behind the business world in technology," she explains. "Many attorneys still use yellow legal pads. 1994 was the big year for the adoption of technology in the legal environment. That also brought the adoption of databases, but imaging was the first technology they took a hold of and ran with."
The benefits of the technology are widespread. Attorneys find they can handle more cases with better case management and decision support than was previously possible. Solo practitioners, without even a secretary or para-legal aide can take on cases involving huge quantities of documents.
The courts benefit as well. In an increasingly litigious society, clogged dockets and lengthy trials invite injustice. Courts that automate find that they are more efficient. The people are served better, at lower cost. These improvements all stem from the adoption of imaging technologies.
CA Court Puts Docs Online
The United States Bankruptcy Court, Central District of California, is the largest court system of its kind in the US. Its five divisions, which include Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, employ a staff of 500. The Court processes more than 120,000 cases per year, which create about 3.5 million pieces of paper annually.
Two years ago, the Court decided it needed to improve its paper handling, so it hired industrial engineer and workflow consultant Peter Diaz. "My goal was to limit paper work," says Diaz, who later joined the Court's full-time staff. "I wanted to reduce the requirement to push paper around."
To Diaz, eliminating paper pushing would require a workflow project that would make documents more easily available to the public, including attorneys. "We used to give the originals to anyone who came in," he recounts. "Citizens would take the paper to a private booth for viewing, copy some pages and return them. Each year we would lose about three percent of our paperwork. We didn't count the pages in a document, and pages would disappear."
In addition, the records were physically removed from the courts, and more pages were lost or mixed up in the transport process. The losses were costly. The staff spent about 15 percent of its time recovering lost documents, Diaz says.
To improve the situation, Diaz proposed installing storage-and-retrieval technologies with automated workflow and Internet access. Despite the promise the technology offered, it was a hard sell to the court administration.
"It was a tough mindset to change," Diaz notes. "Judges are like kings, and some want to do things a certain way. The trick is to introduce new technology in specific steps. I subscribe to the crawl/walk/run model."
Diaz knew that if the project did not include workflow, it was doomed to failure. But mimicking the paper flow electronically would be insufficient. Paper always follows a serial workflow, while electronic documents can branch into parallel paths. If the petitioner and the government could process the same documents simultaneously, Diaz maintained, the time it would take to adjudicate a case could be cut in half.
Diaz wanted a foolproof system, and he sought to build redundancy into every unit. The solution begins with high-speed scanning. The system indexes documents with a unique case number identification and a docket number. The system integrates the images into the court's legacy database. Initially, it stores the images on an Artecon (Carlsbad, CA 760-431-4400) 45 GB Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), level five, to guard against loss. This keeps cases online for about six months.
As the RAID box fills, the system uses Smart Storage (Andover, MA 978-623-3300) SmartCD software to archive the images in the legally-preferred, Write Once Read Many (WORM), CD format optical storage. A Cygnet Storage Solutions (San Jose, CA 408-954-1800), 250-slot jukebox serves archived images to the system in a matter of seconds.
The RAID box has both dual controllers and dual power supplies. "The one weak point was the processor, so we are using dual Pentium 300s and are going to 400s soon," Diaz states. "We are thinking of clustering because of the mission-critical nature of our system. We want 24/7 availability." Diaz hopes that storage technology will improve as fast as his documents accumulate. If that happens, today's documents will be available for ages.
Storage is one challenge, but access to stored documents is another. The logistics presented by court locations in five cities and separate records locations were daunting. Attorneys and citizens needing access to Court documents came from all over, and they employed an almost infinite variety of computer platforms. Clearly, a Java-based solution, with its high interoperability, was the answer.
Eschewing traditional networks, Diaz chose to employ Internet technology from Wade Systems (Oklahoma, OK 405-755-1885). Wade customized its Remote Access to Court Electronic Records (RACER), a browser-based system that sells, by the module, for $4,995 (plus $2,000 per year for continuous upgrades). The system provides Internet and intranet sites that have solved the logistical and compatibility issues.
Anyone can go to the web site, www.cacb.uscourts.gov and gain access to Court documents. Authorized personnel get a user name and password so they can go to a docket and bring up images with their viewer. Security is maintained by firewalls. The workflow is ad hoc; anyone who can download the files can forward them as needed.
The Court's new record system operates smoothly, and document loss has dropped to near zero. Accessibility is unlimited. Attorneys and citizens pay 60 cents per minute for access to the documents, but costs are lower than what they previously paid to see paper. Users can also view and print everything from their home or office, so they don't have to visit a record room. The exact cost savings are difficult to quantify, but the public has gained a more efficient, responsive court system.
Personal Injury Firm Upgrades Store and Retrieve
One of the largest law firms in New York State that specializes in personal injury cases is Finkelstein, Levine, Gittlesohn and Partners, mercifully abbreviated FLG&P. At any given moment, the firm's nearly 200 employees work on some 6,500 open cases in six upstate New York offices.
Through the early- and mid-90s, one of FLG&P's biggest challenges was handling the medical documents that arrived in their office in Newburgh each day -- up to a thousand per day. The hard copies went to the partner working on each case, but the data needed to be entered into the electronic system for sharing, tracking and storing. Transcribers keyed the salient information into a case management system. However, by 1996, rising case loads outstripped this manual process, and data entry fell six months behind.
"Partners had their hard copies, so the cases and clients weren't suffering," explains MIS Director Susan Roe, "but the office was running slowly."
This was not a new problem. Roe had begun looking for an imaging solution in 1990, but FLG&P was a true blue IBM AS/400 shop, and IBM's midrange imaging product was host intensive and prohibitively expensive for Roe. It was only in the middle of the decade that Roe contemplated replacing dumb terminals with PCs. Her imaging aspirations also benefited from the era's freefall of storage prices and skyrocketing capacity.
The freefall/skyrocket phenomenon also applied to Central Processing Unit (CPU) prices. In 1996, Roe was able to upgrade her AS/400 from a Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) model with 1.2 GB on a Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) to a Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) model with 190 GB of DASD. She felt that this much storage was necessary to support the firm's 6.5 million pages in open files.
Recognizing that any imaging solution would require PCs for compression and decompression of images, she began replacing dumb terminals with PCs and brought in a trainer for the terminal operators who, for example, had never pointed with a mouse. Having upgraded FLG&P's hardware, Roe had a choice of software. She chose SpyView from Magellan Software (Laguna Hills, CA 714-455-9551). Magellan is known for its imaging and Computer Output to Laser Disk (COLD) software written for IBM's AS/400. SpyView components covered FLG&P's needs, from scanning to storage to distribution.
For indexing, Roe chose AS/400 "screen scraping," where users enable host applications for imaging without programming changes. An index operator points and highlights fields on a screen and defines them as index keys. These then automatically link the image to application information on the AS/400. Operators at PCs gain access to the AS/400-stored images through Application Program Interfaces (APIs).
For input, FLG&P chose Bell & Howell (Arlington Heights, IL 847-357-0630) scanners -- a duplex model running 50 pages per minute and a similar simplex model. Magellan integrated Kofax' (Irvine, CA 714-727-1733) Ascent Capture software into SpyView's SpyImage capture module to handle indexing and optical character recognition (OCR) on the large volumes of documents.
Quality control uses a Cornerstone (San Jose, CA 408-435-8900) 21-inch DualPage grayscale monitor. A 165-node token ring networks the Newburgh office. Outside offices run under Ethernet, and the whole organization is linked by frame relay.
The imaging project reduced search times from as long as one hour to less than two seconds. Medical data-entry personnel increased their daily productivity from 15 documents per person to 85 documents per person. Integrated faxing provided an additional bonus.
FLG&P has been increasing its imaging capacities and expertise for the past year. For example, the firm now indexes and images every piece of mail. Roe says the firm would eventually like to integrate digital photography of accidents and injuries. The future might also include optical storage, which is cheaper and longer-lived than DASD. For now, she is gratified that the backlog has eased and the offices hum with document automation.
Leveling the Playing Field
One of the strengths of the United States Constitution is that even the most heinous criminal is guaranteed a fair trial. For the indigent, the government appoints a public defender, even in an open-and-shut case of a terrible wrong.
Public defenders never have deep pockets. Career P.D.s learn to make the most from the least. A Minnesota defender's tongue-in-cheek motto is, "A reasonable doubt for a reasonable price."
When Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unibomber, was captured, prosecutors had the resources of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) behind them. Leadership on the case came from none other than Attorney General Janet Reno. The defense team appointed by the government to advocate the interests of Kaczynski had few resources. Nonetheless, they had to process a daunting crush of evidence, including documents in a variety of media.
According to Anne Kemp of Litigation Management Technologies, the DOJ and the FBI had been accumulating data on this case for more than 20 years, but not all of it was useful. "They had voluminous information on suspects as well as massive records on who flew where and when, who called whom and when, and so on," Kemp says. "We had to sift out what was useful.
"The critical part was taking information from Kaczynski's cabin after his arrest," Kemp continues. "The FBI gave us photos of everything in the cabin on 75 mm film wound around cables and stored in canisters." The photos included 20 years worth of handwritten journal entries, including both significant and insignificant information. Amidst meticulous descriptions of bomb mechanics, for example, was the Unibomber's recipe for roast porcupine. The pictures were taken in the dark cabin, and they were hard to read because of glare from the flashes.
At Kemp's suggestion, the defense turned to inData (Gilbert, AZ 602-497-8595). Both a software developer and a service bureau, inData scanned the images and digitized the FBI's video tapes and photographs. All the evidence was bar coded. inData also reorganized the government's documents, burning new CDs to make it easier for the defense.
It is ironic that Kaczynski, whose apparent motive for his repeated murders was his hatred of technology, faced one of the most technologically advanced trials yet prepared. The prosecution planned to present its images from CD-ROMs, and they brought some 500 disks and a 100-disk tower to the Sacramento, CA, courtroom. According to Kemp, their huge files -- with images up to 28 MB -- were difficult to bring up to view. The defense used a Pentium PC with removable, portable storage so information could easily travel from office to court each day.
Following a model employed in the Oklahoma City bombing trials of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, the government mounted recessed monitors in the courtroom desks for the judge, witness and legal counsels. Then there was a large projection screen visible to the jury. The plan was to display evidence on the monitors. If the judge admitted the evidence, the images would then be projected on the screen.
"The defense prepared to use inData's trial data system," Kemp recalls. "It is an image viewing system that allows you to highlight, underline, point to, or color any image. It tells a story to a jury in a concise way."
The defense attorney's opening statement was tied to a sheet containing a series of bar codes. According to plan, he was to sequentially swipe the bar codes as he spoke, letting the software bring up the appropriate image.
As history shows, Kaczynski changed his plea to guilty just before the trial began and he was sentenced to life in prison. All that technology was never used in the Kaczynski case. Nevertheless, the genie is out of the bottle. The adoption of the technology means it is available in the future for a cutting-edge prosecution or defense.
Serving the People
Today's top law firms and courts are rapidly divesting themselves of paper. Burgeoning court dockets and the explosion in case documentation mean that lawyers who are still juggling paper are at a distinct disadvantage.
In each of these cases, document technology has brought the citizenry better service, and, perhaps, better and swifter justice. When more information is available, hopefully judges and juries come closer to the truth. It would be a miscarriage of justice if the truth were skewed because the prosecution or the defense had a technological advantage. But information technologies seem to level the playing field. Small, nimble imaging systems compete successfully with behemoths. Potentially, individual attorneys on a shoestring budget can successfully compete with corporate powerhouses.
Gordon E.J. Hoke is a consultant and journalist based in Plainview, MN. He can be reached at (507) 534-2293 or ghoke@mindspring.com
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