The old image of law students or practicing attorneys searching through shelves of thick law books for the perfect - and sometimes obscure - legal citation has given way in the past 10 years to the computer with the advent and rapid proliferation of electronic legal information services such as WestLaw and Lexis.
Today, computer-aided practice systems, such as the CAPS software developed by Professors Larry Farmer and Stan Neeleman and former research associate Marshall Morrise of Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School, are finding widespread use in the day-to-day practice of law.A practice system is much like an automated legal assistant that can present the system user with interactive checklists and dialogues that gather facts, references and legal decisions. The information is then merged with standardized texts to produce customized legal documents.
"Practice systems are most useful in areas of law that have some routine aspects," explained Farmer. "These would be areas in which a lawyer may see many clients with similar problems or where the lawyer needs to generate complex or repetitive documents."
Farmer, who has been researching computer applications in legal practice since the mid-1970s, has helped organize and will participate in an international conference on CAPS applications in legal education in Salzburg, Austria, in August sponsored by the BYU, Harvard and University of Salzburg law schools.
Farmer teaches a seminar at BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School and occasionally at Harvard Law School on the development and implementation of legal practice systems.
"Students in the seminar learn how to use the software and the system-building concepts to develop practice systems," he explained. "They collaborate with practicing lawyers on a term project, combining their understanding of the software with the lawyers' expertise in a specific aspect of law to create these practice systems," he said.
For example, last year Farmer's BYU law students built a corporation system, a confidentiality agreement system, a small will system and a trademark/service mark system for several Salt Lake City and Provo law firms as well as a divorce system for Utah Legal Services and a prosecutor's system for Orem City.
But, while CAPS-type applications are rapidly expanding, not all lawyers may need or want widespread computer applications in their practices, Farmer noted. "Law practice is very diverse, and while CAPS-type systems may contribute to meeting certain needs, they are not useful in areas of the law that don't lend themselves to systematization," he said.
In developing the CAPS technology over the past 10 years, the BYU research team has made significant advances in reducing the time needed to build practice systems. "We first started out by programming a will system, and at that time it took one very capable individual a year, full time," he explained.