The Gazette 1981

GAZETTE

J LINE 1981

The Word Processor

in Practice

Michael G. Hayes, Solicitor

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