Information Technology Tools I Use
When I began using new information technology in the form of a personal computer loaded with word processing and spreadsheet software, I was automating. I used a computer instead of pen and paper, to make the same notes I had always made, to do the same arithmetic I had always done. Until 1993, when I was in court I used the same technology as the magistrates before me had used for more than a 100 years. I can read the court reports in the Port Adelaide shipping gazettes of the 1880s and know that in the 1980s I sat in the same court rooms, hearing the same sorts of charges, the same kinds of allegations, the same earnest submissions. Even some of the surnames were the same. The drunkeness charges have gone, but the drunks remain. In the library, I could reach for the same books as the magistrate could reach for in 1880. As I sat in the same courtroom and chambers a hundred years after the shipping gazettes went to print, I made my notes in a benchbook, using a pen. I used the same information technology. The telephone had been installed, but it had no real place in my daily work. I cannot tell you what technology will be used by the magistrates at Port Adelaide when statutory senility is advancing on me in the 2020.s. But it will not be pen and paper, and the telephone will not be a trendy accessory sitting on the edge of the chambers desk. By 1997, a computer already sits on the corner of my desk, dwarfing the telephone and connecting me to an intranet and the Internet. In court, I use a laptop instead of a benchbook.I no longer reach for the book of statutes, or the scissors and stickytape for the amendments. From the Internet, over the phone, I download an Act replete with amendments. When I need case law, I am no longer restricted to the superior court decisions handed down in Adelaide. I can see how judges view the same issue: in Canada, in Washington, in Canberra, in London. Instead of following through the indices from the general to the particular...criminal law, property offences, unlawful possession...I follow the keywords from the particular to the general. The danger is that I will be diverted. If I ask a search engine about "law" and "cambridge university", gems such as "the answers to frequently asked questions about Sumerian mythology" turn up in the reference list the search engine generates. Inside the courtroom, instead of a bench book full of illegible scrawl, half done indices of part heard cases, and intricate doodling, I have a hard disk full of legible fonts, and files indexed in at least 4 ways. Because the age of leisure has gone. Time bears down on every front. It takes time to sticky tape those amendments in, time to search those common law indices, time to index those old part heard trials. After a year of using a computer, I found it had reduced, by hours, the time it takes me to get a judgment from being a mental concept to being a typed statement of reasons for decision in the hands of the parties. It reduced the time spent searching for notes about particular passages of evidence. It reduced the amount of time I spent making arithmetic calculations. For the first time in my life, I was getting the same total whenever I added up a column of numbers. The three new pieces of hardware that I have added to my tool kit are the mobile phone, the modem and the CDRom drive. I sometimes use a digital camera, but so far I am found no need to use it for work. I am experimenting with adding a sound microphone. I have not yet confronted the technical hurdles inherent in adding a flatbed scanner to a notebook, but I certainly use one with a desktop computer when I am at home, both for optical character recognition and for image scanning. I have added software to the toolkit. I started with a word processor, and a spreadsheet. I still use a wordprocessor and a spreadsheet. I now use MSOffice95 at work, because it contains Word95 and Excel and the South Australian "whole of government" agreement means that I am required to use the MS products. The other features of the Office suite are useful to have. There is nothing which I particularly needed to acquire. But for the government requirement, I would use the Borland suite. WordPerfect and QuattroPro are better suited to my particular requirements, but I can do everything I need to do by using the MS prosducts. A programme that looked useful was Lotus Improv, a dynamic spreadsheet, but like the desktop database programmes, it would not hold enough information to be of use to me. What interested me was that it could be used to build twelve hyperlinks between pieces of data. Lotus Notes is descended from it, but it has retained too much of the inflexibility of it's spreadsheet ancestor to be of any great use to me. Its real value is that there is now far more room for each item stored in it, and there is a "search" capacity. When I ran one court alone, in addition to arithmetic the spreadsheet enabled me to easily monitor both changes in rates of offending and my own caseflow management, simply from the details of the causelists and the outcome notes I made on them. In building work cases, or other cases where there is reference to losts of numbers, I make my notes in a spreadsheet, not a wordprocessor. Next came a graphics programme, CorelDraw3, for working with bitmap and vector images, as scanning was on the horizon. I have never needed to upgrade it. When scanning arrived, it became clear that a photographic imaging programme would also be needed. Adobe Photoshop 4 has proved to be ideal. I am now learning video production, using VideoWave. VRML, three dimensional virtual reality imaging, will be next after that. After graphics, the choice was either learning programming, which looked to be a one way street in inflexibility, or coming to grips with communications technology, no easy task in 1994, the days of Telix, Zmodem, initialisation strings and other nasties. By 1994, I was on the Internet, but i found I had to learn enough about Unix to be able to get around by using a Unix shell account, the only type which was available in Adelaide. The first hyperlinking html editor that I bought was the original HotDog. It was an excellent piece of software to use as an educational aid. It was absolutely no use in court. Meanwhile back on the Internet the browser revolution had begun. The World Wide Web was coming in via Netscape. When MSFrontPage was released, it was the first html editor which made using an html editor in court a real option. I am currently building a dictionary in Kurzweil Voice, an inexpensive commercial voice control and dictating package. IBM has similar software on display at the trade fair in the foyer. The bulk of my investment is my time. The real cost will be the time it takes to build a dictionary, at home, at night. It is not worthwhile for me to wait for new developments, for when this happens I will need to upgrade the hardware that I use before I can use the improved software. Sound software is resource hungry. Sound software is still relatively primitive, but it will enable me to dictate straight into the wordprocessor and the spreadsheet, and switch between them, using software which has a 30,000 word vocabulary, lets me speak at 100 words a minute, and costs about a hundred dollars, microphone included. |