Re-envisioning Law Practice with Computers: Collaboration and Visualization By Marc Lauritsen and David Johnson [Prepared for the Sixth Annual Technology in the Law Practice Conference, March 1992] Beyond words and numbers Most contemporary computer applications in law deal exclusively with the processing of textual and numeric data by solitary users. We use computers to help us manipulate words and numbers, create and locate documents, store, analyze, and retrieve data. Even today's cutting edge document assembly programs and legal expert systems rarely take us beyond this functional domain. To borrow Shoshana Zuboff's dichotomy, we have done a lot of automating, but not much "informating"--using technology to enrich our work with new forms of information. More particularly, the enormous power of computers to serve as a tool for visualization and a medium of collaboration has hardly been tapped in law. This article and our associated presentation survey some possibilities in these yet largely unexplored areas. Our review of developments and ideas at the confluence of so many disciplinary streams is necessarily only partial and suggestive. We make no claims of immediate practicality, nor of theoretical rigor. Points that baffle some readers may bore the hypermedia literati and artificial intelligentsia among us. Our hope is to stimulate thought, provoke discussion, and help widen our collective scopes a bit as we continue our trek across the strange and wonderful continent of legal technology. Communication Effective communication is central to the successful practice of law. We need to listen carefully and formulate clear questions to elicit details of our clients' goals and problems. We must be effective communicators to give our clients a clear picture of options and issues, to interact well with other lawyers (friendly and adversarial), and to persuade decision makers. Communication is a uniting theme of the two technological directions explored in this article. Both build on the fact that computers are potent tools for communication as well as computation. Visualization technologies draw on the computer's processing power to communicate information more effectively to the user. Collaborative applications enlist the computer as a resourceful intermediary that helps people work with each other. We will take up these each of two modes of communication, and then suggest how they might be exploited and combined in the world of law. Collaboration Computer applications designed to help people work together in teams or groups have become a promising genre. Often termed "groupware", such applications support people in shared activities. Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is now a major research field, with established centers, regular conferences, and periodicals. Groupware builds on enabling technologies like local area networks, graphical user interfaces, client-server architectures, and distributed databases. Electronic mail, document management systems, and online precedent files are common applications that bring the power of the computer to bear in improving group interaction. But collaboration goes beyond resource sharing and simple acts of one-to-one or one-to-many communication. It is usually conceived as a process of active participation in common tasks, of coordinated interaction in shared contexts. One variety of cooperative tools are programs that allow two users, typically at different sites, to "look over each other's shoulder" and share a single computer session through a modem connection or local area network. The same image is displayed on both monitors, and both keyboards (and/or mice) can be used to interact with the computer. MS-DOS applications that provide this ability include pcAnywhere, Carbon Copy, and PC Tools Commute. While some might call this poor man's groupware, it is inexpensive and can be quite useful. Another common mode of CSCW is collaborative editing of documents. Some commercial examples can be mentioned: * ForComment (Access Technology) allows copies of a master document to be checked out and annotated with comments and suggested revisions by other users. The principal author can review the layers of annotations, and quickly swap in alternative and additional formulations of text. * Aspects (Group Technologies, Inc.) and Instant Update (On Technology) enable a group of users on a Macintosh network to work simultaneously on the same text or graphic. * FrameMaker and some other advanced word processing and publishing programs can support multiple users in jointly editing different parts of a master document, while locking out undesired concurrent edits and assuring stylistic consistency across the entire document. Some approaches to groupware occur on the broader environmental level: * IBM's Office Vision, Wang's Interactive Imaging System, Hewlett Packard's New Wave Office, DEC's All-in-One (and a new product called Team Links) contain suites of applications for creating and sharing multimedia documents. * Notes (Lotus Development Corporation) integrates document and database management, forms, e-mail, and related files and applications into a single environment. It has been called a "social spreadsheet." * Work-flow systems, often built on top of e-mail, use forms and scripts to route office work. Examples include BeyondMail from Beyond, Inc. and WorkFlo from FileNet Corp. * Group scheduling and work allocation tools built into such programs as WordPerfect Office may also fit in this category. A further strand of CSCW deals with electronic meetings, where computers are used by participants--all in the same room or physically dispersed--to compare notes, brainstorm ideas, and make decisions. Video conferencing is an early form of this type of groupware. Advanced systems integrate electronic whiteboards. Here, users are typically engaged in some form of participatory design and are aided by being able to share the same visual workspace. * Smart2OOO (Smart Technologies) is a hardware/software solution involving touch sensitive tablets and modems that can layer some groupware functions onto Microsoft Windows applications. * BBN/Slate is a multimedia document conferencing system from BBN Systems and Technologies. It allows users to have the same document on the screens in remote locations and see each other's changes as they happen. Charts, images, spreadsheets, digitized speech, and other data forms can be entered in the document, and external application flies can be enclosed. * LiveWire provides similar functionality for NeXT computers. * The Xerox PARC CoLab liveboard is an example of the many research projects going on in this area. Collaborative technology is being exploited in many fields. Scientists have begun to create electronic journals and virtual laboratories. There is even talk of "virtual hallways" in which people with common interests might digitally bump into each other. The worldwide Internet and our newly funded National Research and Education Network (NREN) will serve as infrastructure for increasingly complex forms of cooperative work. High speed local area networks and other supporting technologies for groupware are becoming commonplace in the legal scene. Most of the above application examples have obvious and useful parallels in the law office. Even if many lawyers seem too individualistic to be good collaborators, or real world law practice too full of conflict and discord, our profession ought to pay some attention. One of the concerns often expressed about the introduction of computers in law practice is the physical and emotional isolation they seem to promote and facilitate. E-mail and online precedent files, while supposedly more efficient than their manual predecessors, reduce the need for face-to-face (or even voice- mail-to-voice-mail) interaction. The advent of "electronic commuting" raises the specter of partners who never see each other. While these negative possibilities need to be dealt with on their own terms, the better forms of computer-based cooperative work may ultimately bring us closer together than we were in the first place. Sight and Insight People are naturally adept at processing visual information. However verbal we may have become, our gifts of visual and spatial intelligence (and perceptual intelligence generally) are more ancient and in many ways more powerful than our capacities for linguistic and logico-mathematical reasoning. Vision antedates language and other "higher" cognitive faculties. We are evolutionarily programmed to process visual information with high efficiency. Compared to the spoken or written word, the visual channel has immense bandwidth. Our eyes pump firehoses of information to our brains every second. Many pictures are indeed worth thousands of words. Preconscious visual processing allows us to recognize subtle differences in faces and fonts with ease. And we manage to store prodigious amounts of visual memory. Most people find themselves constantly thinking in visual and kinesthetic terms. Real or imagined scenarios are played out in the mind's eye. Even abstract concepts, processes, and relationships are typically conceived of in terms of spatial metaphors. At bottom, there may be no other way to think. Some of humankind's most important technologies have been extensions of our visual capacity. The microscope and telescope enabled people to see things otherwise too small or too far to be visible. Cameras that are sensitive to light frequencies outside the range of human vision likewise provide us a window on otherwise imperceivable phenomena. In each of these cases, some part of the "real" world inaccessible to unaided human perception is brought into view via our technology. The computer--or the amalgam of computer, television, fax machine, photocopier, telephone, etc. that will likely become our "information appliance"--may be the ultimate visual prosthesis. Computer graphics Computer simulation of human visual accomplishments remains a hard problem in artificial intelligence that is far from being solved. But Computers can nonetheless be extraordinarily useful in dealing with visual information. Four related and overlapping developments are worth identifying. Imaging or image processing involves the use of computers to store, display, and manipulate images of documents and other things. Multimedia technologies bring other forms of information like animation, sound, voice, and video into the process of computer-human interaction. Graphical user interfaces that capitalize on our visual intelligence are becoming standard in legal as well as other office automation contexts. They use icons and other visual forms to facilitate human-machine interaction. Today's desktop metaphor is giving way to "rooms" and other three- dimensional models. And the small rectangular screen to which we have grown accustomed will soon be an anachronism. Our information systems will increasingly be place- independent, multi-media, and multi-surfaced. We will hear and see what they have to tell us. We will reach out and touch our colleagues and clients. Virtual reality describes a world in which people can be sensorially immersed using stereoscopic goggles, data gloves, data suits, and the like. In some cases VR may serve as a "transportation system for the senses", allowing us to be "telepresent" at distant, unreachable, or unsafe sites. In other cases, the world may be synthetic or fabricated--an imaginary landscape. Compared to the total sensory immersion advanced virtual reality technology will eventually give us, today's most sophisticated graphical applications will seem primitive. Computer graphics in law Some computer applications that produce or make substantial use of graphical material are already reasonably familiar in law: * Paper-intensive litigation or transaction practices have obvious uses for imaging systems. * Charting and graphing features in spreadsheet programs are frequently used for office management, transaction planning, and trial purposes. Colorful three-dimensional graphing modules are now available in many off-the-shelf packages. * Presentation graphics programs are used to create demonstrative evidence; desktop publishing programs make for visually striking marketing materials. * Computer-based simulation techniques are used to generate compelling animations that reconstruct accidents. Scenarios that cannot be re-enacted in real life without undue expense or danger can be portrayed. Counterfactual or "what if" scenarios can be explored, and time-motion analysis performed. * Photographs can be digitally enhanced for forensic purposes to bring out or emphasize features not apparent in their original form. They can be manipulated in color to reveal features having no obvious visual correlate. * Interactive video training programs combine the power of full-motion video with interactive software to put learners in situations approximating real life. * Platting software is used by some real estate lawyers to draw plats based on deed descriptions, compute areas, determine whether or not the description "closes", and solve for missing distances and directions. * Desktop mapping software (like MapViewer, GeoQuery, MapInfo, Descartes, and Atlas Pro) can be used to link various kinds of data with maps, making it possible to visualize demographic patterns, epidemiological hot spots, marketing trends, and the like. "Courtroom graphics can overcome the linear, nonreversible sequencing of talk talk talk, allowing members of a jury to reason about an array of data at their own pace and in their own manner. Visual displays of information encourage a diversity of individual viewer styles and rates of editing, personalizing, reasoning, and understanding. Unlike speech, visual displays are simultaneously a wideband and perceiver- controllable channel." Tufte, Envisioning Information, p. 31. Visualization A distinct mode of making-things-visible involves putting a visual face on things that have no tangible physical reality. Having the computer present live or canned audio-visual material (e.g., a videotaped deposition, the expression of your partner in a telephone conversation, photographic trial exhibits) is basically just time- or distance-shifting existing material. Using the computer to display and help us explore material not otherwise directly perceived by the senses makes things visual that ordinarily are not. The focus of the rest of this article will be on the second of these. It seems reasonable to adopt the premise that rich and diverse forms of information can make for better decisions and more effective communication. How else is computer-based visualization useful? * The incredible processing power and speed of computers can be harnessed in aid of visual representations we could never hope to construct otherwise. Computers supply animation and interactivity, allowing our models to be dynamic, manipulable, and explorable. We can try things out, do what-if analysis in a simulated universe before making potentially irreversible moves in the less forgiving real world. The probable impacts of our choices can be made graphically apparent. And sometimes the very range of choices themselves can become evident in a visual representation. * Computers can enable us to "get an overview", "see the big picture." They can allow us to easily shift perspectives, look at situations from different angles and alternative points of view. Graphical representations can help us notice possibilities, constraints, and degrees of freedom. They can make abstract relationships of implication or causality concrete. They can help us generate creative alternatives. Like any useful map, such representations can draw power from deliberate elimination of detail. "The visual medium is so enormously superior because it offers structural equivalents to all characteristics of objects, events, relations." Arnheim, Visual Thinking, p. 232 Commercial products are now becoming available for this kind of work. For example, * Thinx, from Bell Atlantic, is a Windows-based program that allows users to manipulate various kinds of data simply by moving graphic images--making it easier to see connections and make decisions. * Forest & Trees (Channel Computing, Inc.) collects, combines, and monitors information from a range of sources--spreadsheets, databases--and provides an "electronic dashboard" that lets the user monitor key indicators or "vital signs." Runs under DOS, Windows, and NewWave. * General purpose environments like HyperCard, HyperPad, ToolBook, and Visual Basic can also be used for many of these functions. Outside of the law, some extraordinary research and development is going on with visualization. The physical and life sciences are leading the way. Supercomputers are being used to render three-dimensional simulations of thunderstorms; high-end workstations provide interactive models of protein molecules with which researchers can explore phenomena like folding and docking. Ecologists "watch" three hundred years of fire history at Yellowstone National Park. Engineers examine the electromagnetic behavior of integrated circuits and other devices before they are built. Physicists model the large scale structure of the universe or the quantum mechanics of an atom. Political economists create animated maps based on such datasets as the eleven million roll-call votes in Congress from 1789 to 1989. Architects design digital buildings and landscapes through which they and their clients can virtually walk. Programmers have tools like Software through Pictures to graphically build entity- relationship networks. Visualization techniques have even been applied to human visualization itself--via digitized simulations of neuroanatomy that allow the visual cortex to be metaphorically peeled like an onion and studied in flattened form. Surely we lawyers must be able to visualize something. Legal visualization Lawyers have always used pictures to think about and communicate intangibIe things. Not content to visualize with the unaided mind, we have from time immemorial used paper and pen or pencil to make graphical representations of ideas, problems, issues, strategies, etc. We draw pictures for ourselves, our colleagues, our clients,judges, and juries to clarify, refine, explore, and communicate ideas. Can computer-supported visualization techniques be used to model distinctively legal phenomena, like the statutory law or decided cases on a given subject, a client's situation, a case strategy, organizational structure, a particular legal procedure, or an argumentative terrain? Each of these entails some (inevitably arbitrary) mapping from a conceptual to a physical space. Entities and relationships can be represented as nodes and arcs in a graphical network. Situations and possible "moves" can be captured in the topology of a set of connections. Time can be mapped along a spatial dimension. Size and relative distance of objects can be functions of parameters like importance and immediacy. Location can represent state. Clusters and patterns of graphical objects may signify relatedness or causal interdependence. Color, texture, and shape (or particular qualities like convexity, concavity, and symmetry) can be mapped to any desired features of a situation. Changes of such features over time can also be shown. Ambiguity and uncertainty can themselves be cloaked in visual form. In the legal context, unlike medicine, physics, meteorology, etc., most of the things we want to visualize have no natural visual state. Not only are legal problems not rooted in physical reality, they typically are composed of qualities or dimensions that lack any straightforward metrics. We have to imagine them. The images are non-mimetic, or non-representational. They are to a large extent arbitrary. We have to climb quite a way on the ladder of abstractness as we move from plotting quantitative data in various ways to representing strategies and arguments. Examples of legal visualization In what legal practice settings might it be useful to put a picture on the computer screen? * Graphics can be useful in eliciting facts from a client. For example, the twenty or so factors involved in IRS determinations of whether someone is an independent contractor or employee could be presented as buttons or sliders on a screen. An underlying model of how the factors "cut" could compute a provisional outcome based upon particular choices and settings, and allow the lawyer and client to see what changes in facts or evidence may be necessary to ensure the desired determination. * Pictures can likewise be effective in showing a client options, such as alternative contract clauses arrayed along a continuum in order of importance. * Visuals of course are also effective in persuading decision makers. A graph of payments due, or of actual vs. projected earnings, can convey information in a litigation, arbitration, or negotiation context in a way that no table of numbers can. The question can also be approached in terms of the type of visual material. * Flow chart programs allow us to build manipulate pictorial representations of legal rules, decisions, and procedures. * Decision analysis programs like Arborist and TreeAge use graphical trees to help foster rational choice in the face of uncertainty. Decision trees with a graphical normalized bar measuring expected value can show quickly what probabilities our trial strategies ought to try to influence. * Diagrams of deal structures from a tax viewpoint could show the flow of funds and other aspects of a proposed transaction. The computer could audit the logic of the transaction (such as symmetry in the flow of funds), spot possible tax problems and issues, and suggest alternative structures. * Real estate transactions can be similarly mapped, showing the relationships of the parties. * Markets for the firm's or a client's business can be drawn as overlapping circles, with implications for antitrust analysis. * Diagrams can also be used to chart organizational structure, perhaps for purposes of ascertaining responsibility for wrongdoing. * Sequential time series charts can help organize processes regarding accidents or property conditions. * The jurisdiction of a regulatory agency can be depicted in a diagram that vividly shows an attempt to overreach statutory limits. Some more far-out possibilities we've come up with include: * "Legal radar" and control panel systems that would allow lawyers to monitor the progress of a case or matter, and be warned of upcoming hazards. * Animated pictures of a firm's interactions with its clients over time. * Icon-based document assembly, where tiny likenesses of sections and paragraphs are dragged from palettes of common formulations, perhaps using color to signify which party they tend to favor, which are mutually inconsistent, and which are obligatory. (Shall we call this hieroglawphics?) * Depiction (and debugging) of arguments using "Toulmin" or other diagrams, showing nested webs of premises and conclusions, points and counterpoints, in spatial terms. * Explorable, graphically-based worlds such as "Tort Land", where you turn left at the fountain to learn about negligence. * Suggestively shaped cases arrayed in "case space." In putting its member libraries' catalogs on a CD-ROM, the New England Law Library Consortium provided a facility in which users can visually browse the combined shelf list--- ming a virtual bookshelf that can occasion serendipitous discoveries unlikely in paper (or even ordinary online) catalogs. Lawyers will have to learn new skills to employ maps and pictures effectively. Visualization pushes the boundaries of our expertise-most of us are not graphic designers, visual artists, or cartographers. We will need to develop techniques for mapping legal issues onto dimensions realizable in visual form. We will need to understand how flat surfaces can hold many more than two dimensions; how to use color, motion, size, and time; how to nest images hierarchically; and how to simplify images. We will need to learn the special mechanics of combining words and pictures. Ethan Katsh suggests that many of the characteristics of modern law arise from the medium of print. Some may say that video and other "hot" media will destroy the frame of mind required for legal reasoning. We will need good arguments and evidence to meet critique of these techniques as the use of "cartoons", unprofessional, and the death of reasoned analysis. Collaborative Visualization A natural next step is to wed the foregoing technologies. One marriage might be called "the lawyer-client collaboratory". Clients could be involved in risk assessment or analysis of legal issues by viewing visualizations jointly with their lawyers. Facts could be gathered by giving clients sliders to adjust, scenes to recognize, and objects to point to in a visual landscape. Multi-media mailboxes and workspaces might be made available to clients, so that they can pick up and leave textual and voice messages at any time, review the status of their case, etc. We might offer in-house counsel at client companies "dashboards" that let them track the progress of referred matters on a continual basis. New forms of collaboration with colleagues may also draw on both technologies. We may solicit non-verbal input on draft documents and transaction plans, or engage several lawyers in the valuation of subjective judgment through decision trees. We may find ourselves literally "turning over ideas" on shared graphical tablets. Perhaps the most challenging area is the collaborative creation, on a large scale, of visual animated models of particular substantive areas of the law. One good way for a large group to collaborate, of course, is to build something together over time. The "cathedral" of this generation's legal profession may the jointly-created cyberspace in which the doctrines of the law as well as the techniques of the profession can be explored. Right now pieces of such virtual space can be created on the screen with transparent buttons and other paraphernalia. Soon these graphically-based abstract worlds will be routinely dispensed online over modem or cable. Every lawyer can hang out a virtual shingle and weave his or her own bit of the seamless web. Better lawyering through pictures? Lawyers have come an enormous distance in their use of information technology in the last twenty years or so. But we've just scratched the surface of potential computer applications in law; we've largely ignored whole areas being exploited in other fields. We're like the owner of a Porsche who mostly uses it to drive from the house to the mailbox. Maybe it's time to take our computers out for a spin. To start pushing their pedals to the metal. Interactive multimedia. Digital video. Electronic meetings. Televirtuality. Cyberspace. Are these just around the corner, or way down the road? Should we be pressing the accelerator, coasting, or applying the brakes? While there is much to be learned, we believe that visual and collaborative models of legal situations, processes, and tasks are powerful tools for lawyering. By "re-envisioning law practice with computers" we mean not only re-thinking how computers can be used in practice, but also using them to help us envision new ways of practicing, especially ways that involve vision itself. Doing such things in the face of all the challenges facing our profession will require a lot of--well, vision and cooperation. Selected readings Rudolf Arnheim. Visual Thinking (1969) Association for Computing Machinery. Reaching Through Technology. Proceedings of 1991 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) (New Orleans) Association for Computing Machinery. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) (Hilton Head, 1991) Association for Computing Machinery. Proceedings of the Conference on Organizational Computing Systems (Atlanta, 1991) [SIGOIS Bulletin, Vol. 12, Number 2,3] Association for Computing Machinery. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Los Angeles, 1990) Michael Benedikt. Cyberspace: First Steps (1991) David Gelernter. Mirror Worlds (1991) Linda Jacobson. "Virtual Reality: A Status Report." AI Expert, August 1991, pp. 26-33. Ethan Katsh. The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (1989) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By (1980) William H. Lawrence. Diagramming Commercial PaperTransactions." 52 Ohio St.L.J. 267 (1991) Murugappan Palaniappan and George Fitzmaurice. "InternetExpress: An Inter-Desktop Multimedia Data-Transfer Service." IEEE Computer, October 1991, pp. 58-67. Clifford A. Pickover. Computers and the Imagination (1991) pixel. The Magazine of Scientific Visualization. Pixel Communications, Watsonville, California. Howard Rheingold. Virtual Reality (1991) Joost Romeu. "Computer Graphics for the Courtroom." In Winning with Computers (ABA 1991), pp. 330-337 Michael Schrage. "Computer Tools for Thinking in Tandem." Science, August 2, 1991, p. 505. Lawrence Tribe "Triangulating Hearsay." 87 Harv.L.Rev. 957 (1974) Edward R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) Edward R. Tufte. Envisioning Information (1990) John R. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis (1977) Richard Saul Wurman. Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1991) Shoshana Zuboff. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) Acknowledgement The authors wish to thank NeXT Computer, Inc. and Gregory Miller (of Marger, Johnson, McCollom & Stolowitz, Portland, Oregon, and Inherent Technologies, Inc.) for help in the presentation of some of these ideas.