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GAZETTE
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1994
which heretofore confined the small
claims procedure to the Dublin
Metropolitan District, the District
Court Area of Cork city and the
District Court Area of Sligo.
The Rules may be purchased from the
Government Publications Sales
Office, Sun Alliance House,
Molesworth Street, Dublin 2 on
payment of £1.10 plus postage of 48p.
Fusion of the Legal
Professions
The Minister for Justice,
Mrs.
Geoghegan-Quinn,
has stated that she
has no proposals at present aimed at
merging the two branches of the legal
profession. However, in reply to Mr.
Jim O'KeeJfe,
TD, (Fine Gael) in the
Dail on November 25, 1993 she stated
that this did not mean that the policy
on this issue must continue to be
guided for the future by the views put
forward by the Fair Trade
Commission in its Report of Study
into Restrictive Practices in the Legal
Profession published in 1990.
The Fair Trade Commission had
expressed the view that simply fusing
the legal profession would not be a
means of eliminating the present
restrictive practices in the legal
profession, although it might affect
some of them, and a fused profession
would not guarantee the delivery of
more efficient and less costly legal
services. The Minister stated that the
Commission concluded that any harms
caused, or contributed to, by the
divided profession were certainly not
so great as to warrant a
recommendation by the Commission
that the two branches of the
profession should be compulsorily
fused.
It would not be unfair or contrary to
the common good if there were to be
a single fused profession.
The Minister for Justice concluded that
the Commission did not consider that it
would be unfair or contrary to the
common good if there were to be a
single fused profession. The Commiss-
ion had recommended that nothing
should be done to frustrate the
development over time of a single fused
profession.
Cour t room Tools
Many aspects of human endeavour
have been the focus of modern
technology. Law is sometimes, or
inevitably, behind the times. Lawyers
are associated with the judicial arm of
government and often depend on
Government Departments for resources.
Government Departments are some-
times slow in involving themselves
with modern technological tools.
In the United States, for example,
high tech gadgets are becoming
courtroom tools. Lawyers there have
been making tentative steps at using
computers and video monitors in trials
for several years. Lawyers have used
computers to re-create plane crashes,
highway accidents and even murders.
During closing arguments in a 1993
predatory-pricing case,
Continental
Airlines -v- American Airlines,
a
lawyer for American Airlines
endeavoured to convince jurors to
trust the company's employees who
testified at the trial. In an effort to
make sure the jurors remembered the
person he was talking about, the
lawyer produced pictures in the
courtroom of each witness on a 67-
inch television screen.
In
American Airlines,
it is impossible to
state the effect of the new technology
on the jurors. In this five-week antitrust
case, the jurors took less than three
hours to decide that American Airlines
had not unfairly slashed its prices. In
that case lawyers had been able to
display for the jury portions of
documents, videotaped depositions,
charts and graphs with the flick of a
pen-sized instrument that read bar
codes assigned to each of the thousands
of exhibits introduced during the trial.
Would jurors and a judge look
askance at a courtroom display of
technological firepower? One of the
lawyers in the case stated that his
opinion was that jurors expect you to
do this; they see such technological
displays on the news every night.
Undoubtedly, computer technology
can
assist lawyers in coming to grips
with
a complicated case with
t h o u s a n ds
of documents. Computer-
isation
assists cross-referencing and
key-word searches. Apparently it is
possible to put up to twenty thousand
documents on a CD-ROM. This will
obviously save lawyers renting
additional space to store litigation
material and spending hours rooting
through boxes to find documents.
In
American Airlines,
one of the
plaintiffs lawyers considered that the
plaintiff airline could not as easily
make the point that it was financially
harmed by the defendant's allegedly
improper fare cutting, if it (the
plaintiff) were hauling expensive
technology into court. One lawyer for
the plaintiff stated it was far easier to
show documents by having
transparencies made and putting them
on an overhead projector. Technology
has its limitations; it is not yet
possible to have perfect resolution for
documents on the computer screen.
That will change.
The day will come when courtrooms
in Ireland will be equipped with
computers and (television) monitors.
A lawyer will come into the
courtroom ready for trial, in
appropriate cases, with his or her
CD-ROM.
Courtroom technology will
undoubtedly become cheaper and will
become more readily available. The
day will come when courtrooms in
Ireland will be equipped with
computers and (television) monitors.
A lawyer will come into the
courtroom ready for trial, in
appropriate cases, with his or her
CD-ROM.
Borking Nominees for
Legal Posts
New words continue to appear in our
dictionaries. The campaign that killed
Robert Bork's 1987 US Supreme
Court nomination bequeathed the verb
"to bork" meaning to barrage an
appointee with sensational-sounding
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