The Gazette 1981

GAZETTE

APRIL 1981

machine, so that they can alter text by using the memory of the machine with the minimum of copy- typing. It is indeed possible to make a considerable number of errors in using the machine but usually, instead of carrying out a wrong instruction, the machine simply stops and throws up an "error" signal on the screen. On receipt of the machine, therefore, you must (a) put some one person in charge of organisation, and (b) see that your secretarial staff are adequately and properly trained. General (Organisation Most firms sending out a draft document which is likely to be negotiated upon and re-drafted many times will number and date their drafts. However, drafts which are fairly standard, such as draft conveyances, family home declarations, and other such documents peculiar to par- ticular cases, are often sent out with either no particular date or reference on them or, perhaps, at most, die initials of the solicitor and secretary dealing with the case. You may have noticed that for some time certain (usually the larger) firms have complicated-looking references either on the top of the front page or at the bottom of the back sheet of their draft documents, consisting of a series of numbers and/or letters. These will be the firms that have organised themselves around some form of automatic typing and/or computer. If your firm does not already pay attention to proper referencing of draft documents, correspondence, files etc. you will now find that you will have to accustom everybody involved in your word pro- cessing system to the idea that every document (whether a general precedent or a draft relating to a particular case) must be properly referenced and dated. In other words, every document must be properly and clearly identified. There is nothing difficult about this, but it should be appreciated that until you tackle any problems of disor- ganisations and lack of discipline in your office, new machinery will highlight your problems rather than solve them; you will use the time which you should be saving in clearing up the mess. Bottle-Necks At first you may find a certain reluctance on the part of both your professional and secretarial staff to use the machine. However, as time goes on, you will find that bottle-necks will build up because several people will want to use the machine at the same time. Traditionally, solicitors have worked on a one secretary to one solicitor basis. This is satisfactory in most respects, in that solicitors deal with a large variety of cases at the same time, in many of which a certain amount of "personal touch" is important. Therefore, it has been felt that a case can be dealt with properly only if the same solicitor and (though to a slightly lesser extent) the same secretary deal with every aspect of a case from start to finish. In practice, you will probably find that your Word Processing system will work better either if some of your secretarial staff do nothing else but work on the Word Processing machine of, if you starting only in a small way, if you have a small number of secretaries pool the work of a small number of solicitors so that documents can be drafted and printed out with a minimum of effort and delays. The latter will enable you to retain the one secretary to one solicitor ratio for secretarial (as opposed to typing) work.

the market thoroughly, take such advice as he can get, and use his common sense. The Machine Is Now In Your Office When you take delivery of the Word Processing machine you may first have to get over some psychological barriers. If you have a large number of Solicitors in your office, you will probably find that some of them will feel that the equipment will not be of much use to them and they will not want to use it. Some of the secretaries may feel that the machine will be too complicated to use and may hesitate. However, as you will by now have bought the machine, you will have worked out who on your staff is interested in trying to use it. In our office, we started off by making some under- standable mistakes: 1. Many of the precedents which we had on the mag- netic cards were typed manually on to the word pro- cessing machine and recorded on floppy discs. A somewhat casual and not properly thought out index- ing system was put into operation and the machine was used only as a sophisticated typing and editing machine with a high speed print-out, but many of its most useful functions were either totally ignored or only partially or incorrectly used. This may have been because the three secretaries who attended a two-day training course to learn how to work the machine found it difficult to remember exactly what they had learnt when the word pro- cessor was delivered about two or three weeks later. 2. The handbook was not very easy to follow, unless you already had some idea how to use the machine and I have found it necessary from time to time to prepare memos supplementing the handbook. 3. For the first few months, no one person took overall responsibility for using the equipment properly. 4. One person having ultimately been put in charge of the system, it was not properly appreciated how time- consuming it is to organise people to work in a particular way and to draft (and then check) documents in a form which suits the word processing machine. On this last point, I would mention that I have found that, although everything can be done much more quickly and conveniently on a word processing machine than on a magnetic card memory typewriter, it seems that the slightly increased typing speed, coupled with the appearance of the text on the screen, produces more typing errors. A page of text which requires just a few small insertions of new text or alterations here and there frequently arrives with more typing errors than would have been produced if the job had been done on a memory typewriter, or even a manual typewriter. This seems to be because the keyboard is quicker to the touch and because what may seem an obvious and glaring error on a printed page will not be noticed so easily in a mass of single-space green text on black, or blue text on a grey screen. This does not mean that the word processing machine is more trouble than it is worth because of the in- creased proof-reading which must be done. On the contrary, a word processor is versatile enough con- siderably to reduce typing. This can be achieved only if your secretaries understand fully how to use the 48