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GAZETTE
SEPTEMBER 1978,
COMPUTERS AND LAW
— THE SCENE IN 1978
Joséph L. Dundon, Immediate Past President
The Society for Computers and Law held their third
annual conference in Pollock Halls, Edinburgh, starting
on the evening of June, 30th and finishing on the
afternoon of Sunday July the 2nd.
The first and most notable impression, was the wide
range of interests and nationalities represented at the
Conference. While a majority of those attending were
from England and Scotland there were also
representatives from Northern Ireland, four
representatives from Ireland including the writer,
representatives from most of the European countries
within the E.E.C. and also from the Scandinavian
countries, as well as one or two from further afield
including one from Australia and one from Hong Kong.
Those attending represented mainly practising solicitors
but there was a fair sprinkling of representative from
Government Offices, though sadly none from Ireland. It
is clearly a matter of recorded dogma as far as the
members of the Society are concerned that the use of
computers for accounting functions and the production of
management information for time recording in Solicitors
offices is taken for granted, and the two main topics
discussed at the Conference were various systems of legal
information retrieval this is to say legal research in case
law and statutes using computer terminals connected to a
Comprehensive data base, and word processing that is a
typewriter connected to a Computer memory. The greater
part of the attention was focussed on legal information
retrieval.
The first speaker to deal with this topic was Jerry
Rubin who is the President of Mead Data Central Inc. of
New York. This Company were the originators of the
Lexis System of Information Retrieval, which by all
accounts appears to have been so successful in the United
States and to have pushed its rivals out of the picture.
It certainly seems that the system is very widely used in
the United States and Mr. Rubin gave a figure of monthly
inquiries at the rate of 250,000 though he was not
prepared to disclose how many subscribers were using the
Service since he said that this was information which
might be of use to a competitor. He did however say that
when he last addressed the members of the Society at
their Conference in Warwick in 1974 that there were only
100 users, and it does seem that the growth of the use of
the system has been spectacular.
By the end of this year the system will incorporate in its
data base the Statute Law and relevant Case Laws of
every State of th Union, as well as Federal Statute and
Case Law and it is intended in the near future that Lexis
in association with Butterworths will introduce into its
data-base U.K. Statutes and Cases and extend the
operation of its system to subscribers in the U.K.
Mr. Rubin also indicated that the system was available
for a very high proportion of the advertised time. That is
to say the technical failure was of the order of less than
1%. There was much discussion at the Conference both in
relation to Mr. Rubin's address and that of later speakers
as to the use of the full-text system where the entire text of
the case or statute is recorded in the data base (which was
that used by Lexis) or the use of edited text or head notes.
Mr. Rubin was certainly very strongly of the view that the
full text system was preferable to any form of editing and
the writer was certainly convinced by the arguments
advanced by him in support of this view. Access to the
data is again by the use of a combination of key words
used in conjunction with one or othe,r much as one uses
such words when looking for information in a legal text
book.
It was a little difficult to get precise figures as to the
cost of using this service. Earlier indications were that
some years ago the cost would have been of the order of
30,000 dollars a year, but it would seem that a much
larger number of subscribers and a larger data-base would
tend to bring down the economic cost of providing the
service. It remains to be seen whether it will be offered in
the U.K. at any reasonable cost which would put it within
the reach of a significant number of the profession.
The other main speakers on this topic were Professor
Fiedler, who described the system which had been
developed in Bonn mainly for the use of the Department
of Justice in the Federal Republic, and Norman Nunn-
Price, who is the head of the Working Party established
by the E.E.C. to examine the various systems of Legal
Information retrieval at present in use in the E.E.C.
countries with a view to making a recommendation to the
Commission for the adoption of a uniform system which
might be sponsored by the Commission and introduced
into each of the member countries.
The over-riding impression gained from listening to
Professor Fiedler and Mr. Nunn-Price is that while
various European countries have contributed very
significantly to techincal advances and research in this
field that there has been a spectacular lack of success to
date in co-ordinating these efforts to produce a system
which would be of general use to the legal profession.
Obviously the most significant barrier in the way of
such co-ordination is the lack of
(a) a common language
(b) a common legal system
which gives a tremendous advantage to the United States,
but in the E.E.C. context there is certainly an argument to
be made in favour of using one system throughout the
Community at least in relation to E.E.C. directives and
regulations and Case Law of the European Court. It will
be extremely interesting to see what recommendations
were made by Mr. Nunn-Price's Committee which is
expected to report to the Commission some time in 1979.
One development which is of interest to practitioners in
this country is that the E.E.C. have established now, and
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