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GAZETTE
APRIL 1981
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
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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.