The Gazette 1981

GAZETTE

J LINE 1981

The Word Processor in Practice

by Michael G. Hayes, Solicitor

A DVERTISEMENTS and demonstrations of Word Processing Machines are designed to convince you that every Solicitor's office should have one. You will be led to believe that your secretaries will be so free from typing that they will be able to devote their skills to real secretarial work and that your professional staff will be able to draft excellent documents so quickly that they will be able to devote most of their time and energy to dealing with the important legal aspects of any case. This is true, but it is not as simple as getting the equipment. If you buy a Word Processing Machine, expecting it to take over and do the work for you, you will find after a few months that you and your staff are using the Word Processor as if it were a more sophisticated and convenient version of the now old-fashioned Magnetic Card Memory typewriters. You will not reap the benefits of Word Processing unless you start out with realistic expectations and are prepared to devote a considerable amount of time and hard work to setting up a suitable office system around your Word Processor. Realistic Expectations Most Solicitors deal with such a variety of cases at the same time that they tend to draft documents on a once-off basis. No doubt we all have bundles of precedents, indexed to a greater or lesser extent, but each time you use a precedent for a particular client you tend to feel that you have corrected and improved upon the original draft. Therefore, there is always a temptation to use the version of the document which you used in the previous case. The result is that you end up with many documents from which to chose, none of which could be said to contain a cross-section of the most important points which you may need. You therefore have to work your way each time through what occurs to you as being the important points, resulting in omissions, mistakes, bad draftmanship and repetitive dictating of standard or semi-standard clauses. It is realistic and proper to expect that Word Process- ing would enable the professional staff to organise their precedents and whatever other standard information they require in such a way that any of it can be obtained at any time and quickly assembled and put on paper. However, you would be wrong and disappointed if you thought that such a result would be achieved simply by having all your office precedents typed up and recorded on your Word Processor system. You will have to index them properly and prepare standard paragraph files and check-lists to match your precedents.

Secretaries can rightly expect that they will save themselves an enormous amount of time and drudgery typing and re-typing fresh drafts and engrossments of long documents and the same long boring covenants, trusts, indemnities, exceptions and reservations which are contained in much the same form in so many different documents. However, if you expect the Word Processor to do the work for you, you will find that your Secretaries will waste the time they save hunting around for the pre- cedents they are supposed to be using or, worse still, re- constructing the urgent document which needs to be en- grossed because the final draft has got lost through incorrect machine operation, or the only floppy disc con- taining the final draft became damaged and the information corrupted. The expense of Word Processing is not limited to the purchase price of the machine. You will have to be prepared to consider buying many extras. Not all the extras are essential and whether you will require them will depend on your particular needs. Printers can produce a very irritating and tiresome noise. If girls are expected to do secretarial work and take telephone calls in the same room as the printer, you will have to be prepared to buy an acoustic hood. Depending on what you buy and thé physical characteristics of your office, you may have to consider buying additional furniture to hold the equipment. You may have to buy folders for holding the precedent documents which you create and you will need a safe to hold the discs. Although these and many other extras are only a small part of the total cost of Word Pro- cessing, they are mentioned in order to stress that the pur- chase of the basic equipment is, in many ways, the begin- ning rather than the end of your new system. Preparatory Work Before making any orders you will to assess the needs of your office by looking at the number of people involved, the kind and amount of work, the amount of money available and the attitude of your staff. It is difficult to make generalizations because every office is a mixture of its particular individuals. However, even if you were getting the smallest stand-alone system (i.e. 1 screen/keyboard and 1 printer), I think it is important that there should be at least two or three professional staff and perhaps at least two secretaries who are sufficiently interested in word pro- cessing and prepared and able to work together in setting up a system suitable for their office. Every person thinking of investing in word processing must investigate 97