The Tools of the Trade Now Include Data Centers and Laptops; Courtroom Connectivity Is an Issue
The legal team sits at its table in the courtroom as its leader begins cross-examination. As testimony proceeds in the complex civil case, one team member with a laptop computer taps now and again. Whenever a key document is referred to by the witness or the counsel, within seconds it appears on a large display screen facing the judge and jury.
“That’s technology working the way it should,” said Kathlene Lowe, managing partner of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP’s Irvine Spectrum office and member of the firm’s complex-litigation practice group.
Of course, technology doesn’t always work the way it should.
Mike Yoder, a partner in the Newport Beach office of O’Melveny & Myers LLP and a business trial lawyer, said he recently tried a case outside OC in which his team used the venerable overhead projector and transparencies in its presentations to the jury, while the other side had a laptop and monitors.
“It didn’t work as well for them,” Yoder said. “It was slow, they had trouble finding the documents, and the documents didn’t fit on the screen. The jury had an easier time following our presentation.”
Yoder didn’t mention how he fared in the case, but made the point that technology is dependent in large part on who is using it and the physical capacity of the courtroom to accommodate it.
However it is presented, the documentary evidence a jury sees is just the tip of a huge information-processing iceberg. Attorneys in complex civil cases need to collect, distribute and have ready access to hundreds of thousands, even millions of pages of documents. Courts have to take in, store and make available filings that are measured not in pages but in boxfuls. And somebody has to make sense of all of this material.
Many firms, especially the larger ones, have in-house electronic storage and retrieval systems, though often they outsource the imaging and store hard-copy originals offsite in so-called depositories, especially in cases in which several teams of lawyers need access to the materials. But the increasing size and complexity of some civil litigation,especially cases with large numbers of plaintiffs, such as construction-defect suits or class-action product-liability suits,can strain a firm’s capacity.
“I have bumped into storage limitations on occasion,” said Bill O’Hare, managing partner of Snell & Wilmer LLP’s Irvine office and a civil litigator.
He cites a current case, a mortgage loan fraud action against Allstate Mortgage being tried in Los Angeles.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of transactions,” O’Hare said. “And every party has a file.”
“These kinds of cases would be candidates for outsourcing not just the imaging, but also the (electronic) storage and indexing,” he said.
It’s a niche that has drawn the attention of Arthur Andersen, which recently opened a 40,000-square-foot document-management facility in Cypress, to cater to firms involved in large, complex litigation.
According to Gary Schramer, the firm’s head of business development for legal services, the firm’s Cypress Technology & Business Center is unique within Arthur Andersen. It employs 70 to 80 full-time engineers, database administrators, Web developers and statisticians, and at any time can have 50 to 150 temporary employees, mostly involved in document “conversion”,scanning and coding the thousands of pages of legal documents. Schramer said the center, a successor to a smaller facility the firm had operated in Phoenix, can process more than a million pages a month.
Without naming names, the company said one current project at the Cypress center is a 20 million-page collection for a major class-action suit that is accessed by hundreds of attorneys from firms across the U.S.
Which brings up another major concern in legal document management: access and security. There is off-the-shelf software available and in use at many firms for controlling access to electronic documents. Andersen has used some of these and some proprietary software to build a system that allows different levels of access to groups of documents, individual documents or even parts of documents, Schramer said.
“Clients decide who has access to what,” he said. “We can assign access to groups or to individuals.”
Users get an ID and password, and can access the stored documents via phone lines from anywhere, he added.
Theoretically, that includes from a court but, Schramer said, that depends on “the connectivity of the courtroom” and not many are equipped for any connection, let alone one with the bandwidth necessary for prompt document retrieval.
“Typically, before going to court, attorneys will print the documents they’ll need or put the information on CDs,” he said. “They can access it more readily that way.”
But that may be changing in OC, too.
The Orange County Superior Court is a few weeks away from moving into four Santa Ana courtrooms that have been refurbished and upgraded with the latest in information-processing technology. The so-called Civil Complex Litigation Facility is being developed in space that was vacated by federal judges when they moved to the new Ronald Reagan Federal Building in Santa Ana.
According to Judge William McDonald, who sits on the court’s complex-litigation panel, the new courtrooms will have conduits in the floors and ceilings for wires or fiber optics, as well as the capability to handle wireless systems now on the drawing boards.
Each courtroom will have a central station from which an attorney can control a presentation from a laptop. Monitors will be distributed around the courtroom: at counsel tables, the judge’s desk and the witness box. There will be a drop-down projection screen for the jury to view exhibits and presentations.
The monitor in the witness box will have what McDonald called “John Madden capability”,that is, the witness can use a stylus to electronically draw on exhibits such as photographs and maps, and the witnesses’ changes can be saved and stored as new exhibits in the case. The judge’s monitor will have a “kill” switch so he can control what the jury sees.
The clerk’s station will have a recordable compact disc drive, and all exhibits will be placed on CD. The jury room will have a CD reader, so jurors can easily and quickly view the exhibits.
In addition, the system will include a video system that will allow attorneys to present videotaped testimony or depositions, and even call up and show a witness’ answer to a given question in a deposition in the course of his or her trial testimony, to highlight discrepancies or consistencies.
The courtroom also will have the capability to display a transcript in real time for hearing-impaired jurors or witnesses, and that can be accessed via modem by research attorneys at the teams’ offices.
Being developed by Doar Information Systems of Las Vegas, the new courtrooms are a demonstration project for the firm. Doar is footing the equipment and installation costs, according to court’s executive director for planning, research and consulting services Mary Lou Des Rochers. The firm will charge $500 a day for use of each courtroom system, Des Rochers said, which will be billed to whatever team or teams use them each day.
“Definitely, equipping courtrooms will be a big help,” said Snell & Wilmer’s O’Hare. “For the past 10 years, people have been having to bring in their own wiring, monitors and other equipment. So, having the basic plumbing in will be good.”
In addition to the new courtrooms, which are slated for move-in by mid-February, the OC court is hoping to bring on line this year a system for the filing of court documents electronically.
Now all court filings must be hard copy, delivered by hand to the court, usually with several copies for distribution to other parties in the case as well as the court. This can mean scores of boxes full of paper in complex cases.
“We’ve had trials where the facilities people were concerned about the load on the floor from the weight of all the boxes the attorneys brought in,” McDonald said.
The electronic system will allow for filing via modem, with the capability of hot linking from citations to other filings in the case or to case law. A pilot system is expected to be up and running in the family-law section in a few weeks. But the needs of the complex-litigation section are more, well, complex, and that system won’t be up until the end of this year, McDonald said.
In all of the changes, McDonald said, “we want to make things as smooth and efficient as possible and at the same time keep the courtroom clean.”
“To have a chance to do this, to design a courtroom for the future, it’s really wonderful,” McDonald said.
