By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
Some “Luddites” are born (I was forced into it.) I have been a card-carrying Luddite since college in the 1980’s. The Luddites were an early 19th century radical group led by Ned Ludd, who fought progress by destroying textile machinery as a form of protest. Luddites feared that this new technology would replace them.
I joined their ranks in college, when professors tried to teach me computer programming in 1980– using Fortran cards. Oh, you won’t believe these little demon-spawned torture devices. They worked by forcing air through holes punched into index cards—holes which must be punched in a precise order called “syntax.” (I know this, because the words “syntax error” whispered tauntingly to me from under my dorm room bed each night.)
This was a particularly special ring of hell for a highly “creative” person to find himself. I don’t like putting square things into tiny little boxes, let alone, in a particular order. (I am actually more a “mischievous scamp.” The word “creative” just makes it sound like there is some art to what I do.)
Anyway, Fortran worked by repeatedly punching little rectangular holes in a stack of index cards the size of a book of “$5 off any three-topping pizza” coupons. But because the machine only punched rectangles in the cards, like typing a letter with a machine that could only type the symbol “O,” it was hard to tell if you misspelled a word.
That is when I decided to join the Luddites and go to law school, where I would be safe from technology. Courts even use “Oyez” to say “howdy,” which is so archaic, it literally translates to “hear ye,” another thing normal people haven’t spoken since the Salem Witch Trials.
Certainly, there would be no “syntax” in law school.
West Publishing. How legal research used to be done. Well, that was the first thing I got wrong. In law school, we had to perform legal research the old-fashioned way, using a set of digests published by West Publishing Co. (think really, really large dictionary.) This would suggest case law in volumes of books called “Reporters.” This is where case cites come in a particular order that we had to get perfectly correct.
The cite, “234 F.3rd 998” means the case is in the 234th volume of the third iteration of Federal Reporters beginning on the 234th Page. (The Reporters only go from “1” to “999” then start over in a new set at “1”; hence, the 3rd set of Reporters would have two sets of 999 before it).
We pulled cases from the bookshelves, copied them by smashing them flat onto a photocopiers, one page at time. Then, the validity of the cases cited had to be checked using a second set of red, hard-backed books called “Shepard’s Citations.” (It was a big “no no” in research, to skip this “Shepardizing” step.)
Then came Westlaw. Launched in 1975, Westlaw had a machine called a “WALT” hooked up to a phone line, before computers, before cell phones—When an “Apple” was food.
Next, Westlaw came in an album of CD-ROMs (This is why we call phonograph recordings “albums.” Records used to spin so fast, we needed a set of discs, maybe as many as 6 in an album, to hold an entire performance.)
Westlaw searches once required their own syntax, called “Boolean” connectors, (“malpractice /s breach +5 contract”) meant “search ‘malpractice,’ in the same sentence as ‘breach,’ and within 5 words as ‘contract.’”)
And I was back in hell.
The AI Version of Westlaw. These days, Westlaw has an advanced AI program that has released me from hell, they call “CoCounsel.” It does not matter what I ask it. Nor how I ask it. I don’t even have to ask it anything. I can drag and drop the other side’s pleading and it will draft discovery request.
If I want to talk to it, I can ask it to draft a pleading, or a motion in plain English and it will do a fairly good job. Best of all, when opposing counsel files a response 1 hour before a hearing, I can drag and drop the Brief into Westlaw which can provide all of the potential counter-arguments in 5 minutes.
It is like having a team of $500 an hour associates. But it only costs $500 a month. We still must check any citations that we employ in any court filing. (There are many reports of lawyers skipping this step, which is the functional equivalent of failing to “Shepardize” back in the old days.)
So I am a Luddite no more.
This not only saves my clients money, it frees me up to do more interesting things with my time– like being the creative mischievous scamp I was always meant to be.