"The Computer in the Law Firm: the Early Automation of Legal Research Work, 1964-1970"

Contemporary debates about the automation of lawyers’ work with artificial intelligence often revolve around the binary question of whether legal work (or certain legal tasks) can be automated with computers. This presentation examines an earlier moment in the history of computing and the legal profession: an attempt to automate legal research with an information retrieval system in 1960s Ohio. Beginning in 1964, a group of Ohio lawyers began investigating how computers could be used to improve the work of lawyers. Their work culminated in the creation of a legal information retrieval system, the Ohio Bar Automated Research (OBAR) system (later known as LexisNexis), in 1968. Their initial motivation was to free lawyers from the physical and mechanical demands of legal research. Automation offered a way to solve an inefficiency: time spent hauling books off library shelves could be replaced with more time for substantive work, thus contributing to speedier court proceedings and cheaper legal services. In the process of developing the OBAR system, however, their vision shifted from a focus on the physical demands of legal research to a focus on the people involved in legal research. Later articulations of the OBAR system emphasized the elimination of any human mediation between lawyers and court cases as its primary goal. Despite a long-standing reliance on an array of people for legal research work, legal research emerged from this automation process as a solitary endeavor enabled by the computer. The presentation argues that the shift to focus on human subjectivity rather than inefficiency was part of an effort to bolster the computer’s neutrality and objectivity. It shows how automation works to reshape not only how work is done, but also how it is understood.