The Gazette 1994

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. 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. Fusion of the Legal Professions 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

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.

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.

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 Continued on facing page

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