The Gazette 1978

SEPTEMBER 1978,

GAZETTE

COMPUTERS AND LAW — THE SCENE IN 1978

Joséph L. Dundon, Immediate Past President

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 187

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