Synthesis and Storage

For the ordinary case in a magistrates court, even a freeware wordprocessor and a shareware spreadsheet will cover almost everything that comes up when benchnotes are made and a decision delivered.

The Benchnotes Index leads to some other example files. All facts are hypothethetical.

Extracts from the notes displayed on windows in any of the first four categories are "cut and pasted" into the fifth window, using a mouse, either while the trial is in progress or when the evidence is finished.

The material in the fifth window is then edited, and the other windows are closed..

The material in the fourth window can be in note form if it is going to be used during delivery of ex tempore reasons. It can be edited for spelling and grammar mistakes, rendered into sentences, if the judgment is to be published in written form. The same basic structure is used for trials, sentencing, and interlocutory applications.

Once a magistrate gets used to this method, it is much quicker to prepare reasons by using a keyboard than by using a dictaphone or by searching benchbooks and making handwritten notes. The "find" facility in a wordprocessor locates the passage being sought more quickly than it can be located by thumbing through a bench book, and the notes are far more legible.

At an AIJA workshop last year, I was interested to find that when using a computer in this way during a group judgment writing exercise, our group was able to prepare a hypothetical judgment as quickly, and as coherently, as other groups could do by using pen and paper. The notes were set out in "ex tempore form".

Had we had to find and cite legal authority as well, our group would have finished long before the other groups did. We would have been able to cite the whole of the relevant sections of the relevant Acts, as well as the caselaw. We would have been able to find it without moving from the tutorial room we were using, using the telephone line running into the room. The others would have had to find law libraries and photocopiers in other buildings..

Getting used to doing all of this took me nearly a year from the day I first looked at a WordPerfect5 menu bar and wondered what on earth "File" meant. I had to identify that particular topics are sorted into a particular order and prepare files on the same bases, I had to discover the windows facility, I had to wonder whether I really needed to type the same thing over and over again in many different cases. I had to develop indices for the files I had stored.

Documents can be printed into many ways. They are not always printed on paper and popped into the post.

I use a laptop which is not connected to the CAA internal network, partly to protect the network while I concentrate on running an experimental field station inside the courtroom, but primarily because linking my laptop will confine me to printing on paper. Printing and posting costs the CAA money. It is less work for me and a bigger saving for the CAA which supplies me with a laptop if I publish material electronically.

I have always delivered reasons before the nominated day if the reasons are ready. Counsel who receive copies of reserved judgments in advance of the formal making of the final orders do not need adjournments to prepare their arguments about the anciliary orders, such as costs and interest.

Since 1994, I have been printing advance copies of judgments on counsel's fax machines, direct from the wordprocessor, using a modem attached to the laptop and the phone line.

When one fax machine ran out of paper while I was trying to print a judgment on it late at night in November 1996, I sent the judgment out by email, as I knew the Internet email address of the chambers. Next day, my clerk rang the chambers and told the staff to check their email.

Now I give counsel the choice. They can decide whether they want to receive their copy of the reserved reasons in court on the day, in the post, by fax, or by email. The greatest number request reasons be sent by fax, but an increasing number are asking for email copies delivered direct to their desktop, so that they do not have to look through every document coming out of shared fax machines. No-one asks for copies by post, or for judgment on the day.

By next year, I should be no longer using the keyboard unless I want time to think.

I am learning to build sounds for, and to use, a voice activated software programme, from Kurzweil, which is cheap and which will do most of the work I now do by using keyboard and mouse.

It will enable me to put data into programmes such as wordprocessors and spreadsheets, switch between programmes, and switch between windows within programmes.

Some cases have lots of facts, or lots of exhibits, or lots of documents. It is not easy to fit them into the 'in and out' routine of the magistrates court, so often they become partheard, with months passing in between the different days of the hearing.

If there are 50 charges, 37 witnesses and three times as many exhibits, wordprocessors and spreadsheets help but it is a messy business. The whole point of using software is to avoid messes.

It makes more sense to have one record of the whole linked to several different angles, for access to the information to be dynamic and object oriented as well as access to the whole.

Most of this can be done in a reasonably sophisticated wordprocessor. I use a WYSWYG html editor as it is a tool specifically designed for this kind of task; it is so easy to use it to create image maps and bookmarks and hyperlinks, and to use appearance and tables for indexing purposes.

In 10 years time we will still need the support staff we use now. Instead of producing text they will be following our voice commands and producing audio and video. Production is timeconsuming. They can do the task more cheaply than judges and magistrates can, just as they are better at recording shorthand and typing. It makes no sense to pay someone a decisionmaking wage and then to put them to work on clerical tasks.

This is a fast developing area, where Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence research is being applied to create new software. In 10 years time we will be using neural net technology whenever we use our decision support software.

Artificial Life is not just about viruses. Other concepts have taken Wall Street by storm, and pure mathematicians and physicists specialising in AI and AL are now among the highest paid people working in the stockbroking firms. CityBank and the Santa Fe Institute (New Mexico) started the ball rolling when they created a specialist "thinktank" for combining the resources of specialist social scientists and specialist "hard "scientists.

If you read nothing else about computers, it is worth coming to grips with the some of the basic concepts of Artifical LIfe and Artificial intelligence: complex adaptive systems, emergent phenomena and nonlinear dynamic systems, for these concepts contain new insights into the trial process, the sentencing range and the legal system as a whole.

On the Internet I have been told US students began some early work in this area a couple of years ago, using the sentencing databases at a local court in California. I lost the relevant eddresses for finding them, in a hard disk crash, and I have never been able to discover what were the results of their research.