From Research to Search: Technologies and Techniques of Legal Research, 1880-1980

Abstract

In 1964, the Ohio State Bar Association (OSBA) embarked on a project to harness computer technology to automate legal research. After three years of investigation, it established the Ohio Bar Automated Research (OBAR) organization and contracted a local computer company, Data Corporation, to develop an electronic legal research service. Despite initial skepticism and mounting costs, these lawyers and technologists managed to launch a working service by 1969. The service – also named OBAR – was available through remote consoles placed in law firms, libraries, and government offices. By 1973, an improved system was relaunched as Lexis, a soon-to-be-national legal information retrieval service. Lexis went on to become a staple of American legal practice while OBAR gradually faded out of the picture. This dissertation tells the story of the OBAR system and its promise of automating legal research. What did it take for lawyers to begin using and trusting computer technology for their work? I argue that the automation of legal research required both conceptual and material rearrangement. Legal research was a deeply social activity supported by an intricate infrastructure of people, technologies, and techniques. To be trusted and used, the computer had to be constantly charged with meanings, often contradictory ones. It was presented as a tool that would be integrated into an existing legal research process and a technology that would overhaul legal research. The computer was attributed mechanical qualities, like being objective or operating according to instructions, and human ones, like being sophisticated and capable of conversation. These contradictory meanings, along with the gap between promise and reality, were constantly sewn together as part of the computerized system’s development and marketing process. To capture the process of automation, this dissertation traces legal research practices before the computer, the development process of the new technology, and the competing notions of trust and credibility in its early years. The first section traces the splintering of legal research into a distinct task that could be taught, delegated, and automated. In the first chapter, I focus on print legal research technologies and legal research instruction through the first half of the 20th century. I show that innovations in legal research went hand-in-hand with a reallocation of legal work among lawyers and non-legal staff. Examining legal research manuals shows that instruction in types of law book gradually gave way to a more systematic approach to legal research. The second chapter considers the history of legal research work through an examination of the law office and the distribution of labor within it. It shows that the development of legal research into a distinct task that could be delegated was intertwined with social, professional, and technological developments at mid-century. The third chapter describes how the specter of automation focused bar associations’ attention on legal research practices. It shows that legal research fit into a social and professional setting. Lawyers relied on an array of technologies and personnel to produce answers to legal questions. As a whole, the section argues that three factors joined to make legal research into a distinct task, thus making its automation possible: the development of instructional materials and courses on legal research, the growth and bureaucratization of law firms, and the introduction of women and machinery into the law office in the 20th century. Two chapters and two short excursuses make up the second section, which focuses on the development and early adoption of the OBAR system. In chapter four, I examine the entanglement of technological choices and ideals in the process of developing the OBAR system in the 1960s. I show that the focus on direct use by lawyers was meant to cast suspicion on human judgment while touting the computer as an objective and trustworthy tool. Excursus one unpacks OBAR’s promise of an interactive system. It shows that at the same time as the system was likened to human dialogue, it offered a substantially different interaction with court cases, a process that altered the epistemic and social setting of legal research. Chapter five considers the reactions of OBAR’s early users as communication consoles were placed in law firms and libraries across Ohio in the 1970s. Relying on call reports and correspondence, I examine controversies around the system’s accuracy and credibility. Excursus two tells the story of what came out of the system’s promise in light of later developments. Focusing on the chasm that developed between lawyers and technologists in defining the system in the 1970s, it explains how an approach that focused on the system as a product prevailed over an approach that viewed the system as a service to the profession. To become a successful national product, Lexis had to shed its connections to the organized bar and give up any social aspirations.