BAME at the Bar

Black Lives Matter in 2020 highlighted the disparity in our society and the legal profession is not exempt. An old boys club underpinned by uneven playing fields; the legal sector undeniably has a diversity problem. Naturally, this also extends to the legal technology industry.

 

Black and minority ethnic (BAME) groups and women are increasingly unrepresented in the legal technology industry. A study of racial diversity among founders of lawtech companies conducted by Kristen Sonday, COO of Paladin, discovered that of 478 founders of lawtech companies in the US, only 26 were black or Latin. Within the lawtech industry in the UK, the same groups are also underrepresented. The UK employs more BAME individuals in its tech industry than any other sector, they are less likely to achieve leadership roles.

The issues in diversity within legal technology appear to stem from the barriers to the legal profession itself. Recent data collected by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) revealed that only 21% of solicitors were from BAME backgrounds. Black lawyers are significantly underrepresented, making up 3% of all lawyers in England & Wales, a figure that has only risen by only 1% in the last six years.

The reality is equally bleak at the Bar. The latest Bar Standards Board (BSB) report on gender, ethnicity and social background of barristers suggests that diversity and inclusion figures have only marginally improved. Although the percentage of female QCs has increased since 2018, men still outnumber women with 61.3% of practising members identifying as male. the Bar. The percentage of BAME practising barristers has increased by 0.6%, but there are still only 13.6% BAME barristers at the Bar.

BAME individuals are also reported to have less representation in senior positions. The Diversity of the judiciary 2020 report suggests that only 8% of court judges and 12% of tribunal judges identified as BAME at 1st April 2020. The proportion of judges who identify as BAME is gradually progressing but remains considerably lower for senior-level court appointments than tribunals. .

A diverse legal sector can improve employee engagement, encourage understanding of differing perspectives, and attract a variety of divergent skill sets that can lead to innovation and promote creativity. As such, enhancing D&I in the legal field will inevitably bolster the lawtech industry as more creative ideas surface. A diverse workforce can offer unique styles, thinking and methodology, leading to better problem-solving models. By expanding the recruitment pool, the legal sector and in turn, legal technology, can only improve further.

For a profession responsible for the administration of justice, it is also crucial that it reflects the population it serves. Legal professionals in the industry must represent communities more closely if they are to trust in an independent and effective legal system. A diverse consumer of legal services will require a diverse legal profession to serve them. Thus, D&I will provide a better choice for the population and undeniably encourage potential clients to access legal services, resulting in a better consumer experience.

There is so much more that needs to be done. The question remains, how do we improve?

 

UPDATED 2023.05.23


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

Triflers Need Not Apply

The subject of Erick Lawson’s bestselling book The Devil in the White City, H.H. Holmes, is often regarded as “America’s First Serial Killer,” and he may have been – America’s first MALE serial killer, that is. However, a little over a decade before Holmes built his “Murder Castle” in preparation for the 1893 World’s Fair, lonely men would visit a LaPorte farm, and never leave.

 

A young Belle Gunness

Byrnhild Paulsdatter Storseth was born in Norway on November 11, 1859.  She later changed her name to Belle when she immigrated to the United States in 1881.  In 1884, she married Mads Sorenson in Chicago.  The couple owned a confectionary in the city; however, it burned down under mysterious circumstances about a year after it opened.  Mads died in 1900. Ironically, he died on the only day his two life insurance policies overlapped.  His death was ultimately determined to be due to an enlarged heart; however, Mads’ family suspected Belle poisoned him.  With the Sorenson family asking questions, Belle left Illinois and used the life insurance proceeds to purchase a farm near LaPorte, Indiana.

 

Belle and three of her children. Jenny is the oldest girl in this picture.

Reports differ whether Belle had children with Mads, however, the 1900 census listed three children, Myrtle, Lucy, and Jenny, as part of Belle’s household.  Not long after Mads’ death, Belle married Peter Gunness, a fellow Norwegian immigrant.  Belle and Peter lived with the three children and Peter’s infant daughter at the LaPorte farm.  Within a week of their wedding ceremony, Peter’s infant daughter died of uncertain causes.  Peter died in 1902 from a fatal head injury.  In 1906, Belle’s foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared.  Belle claimed she had sent Jenny to a finishing school in California - which was later determined to be a lie.

 

After Peter’s death, Belle began placing personal advertisements in Chicago newspapers as well as others around the Midwest which read:

“Personal – comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes.  No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit.  Triflers need not apply.”

Between ten and twenty men answered these ads and visited Belle at the LaPorte farm.  Only one is known to have returned home after Belle’s behavior made him uncomfortable.

 

Oddly, not many family members inquired as to what happened to the men who answered Belle’s ad and then mysteriously disappeared.  However, Asle Helgelien contacted La Porte police after his brother, Andrew, failed to return home after traveling to Belle’s farm.  His call likely prompted the third act of this tale - arson and possible escape.

 

Four of Belle's known victims.

On April 28, 1908, Belle’s house was destroyed by fire.  In the charred ruins, investigators located the bodies of Belle’s remaining children, as well as a body initially identified as Belle’s - though that identification was questionable because the body lacked a head.  The investigators began searching the farm for clues about the source of the fire and found something much worse - bodies.  Ten bodies were found buried on the farm, and Belle’s farmhand, Ray Lamphere, was found in possession of the personal effects of many other men, presumably those who answered Belle’s personal ad.

 

Ray Lamphere

Lamphere was tried for arson and murder.  He revealed the details of Belle’s crimes in an effort to absolve himself of responsibility, but he was still convicted of arson and sentenced to twenty years.  He died the next year in prison.  Many have wondered if Belle died in the fire on her farm in LaPorte.  Belle emptied her bank accounts days before the fire.  Lamphere told investigators that Belle escaped after she killed a woman prior to the fire, dressed her in Belle’s clothes, fitted the body with Belle’s false teeth, and put the body in the fire.

 

The ruin of Belle's house after the fire.

In 1931, a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested for poisoning her employer in San Francisco.  Many believed Esther was a reemerged Belle; there was not time to investigate that claim, as Esther died while on trial. In 2007, a team of forensic anthropologists and graduate students from the University of Indianapolis were granted permission by Belle’s niece to exhume the body believed to be Belle’s to conduct DNA testing. Using an envelope they believed Belle sealed, they attempted to match the DNA.  However, there did not exist enough DNA available on the envelope to test against the DNA of the body, so the test results were inconclusive.

Esther Carlson and Belle Gunness...or are they both Belle?

 

 

Sources:

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/belle-gunness/

https://murderpedia.org/female.G/g/gunness-belle.htm

https://laportecountyhistory.org/exhibits/belle-gunness/

 

 

 

 

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

The Copyright and the Commodore

On March 25, 1745, John Barry was born in Tacumshane, County Wexford, Ireland.  He traveled from Ireland to Philadelphia in 1760.  He served as a cabin boy on a merchant ship and became a master seaman by the time he was twenty-one years old.  For a period of time, Barry was the captain of a merchant ship between Philadelphia and the West Indies, until he lent his seafaring skills to the American Revolution.  As the captain of the Lexington, Captain Barry captured the British ship “Edward” on April 7, 1776, the first naval capture of the American Revolution.

 

Captain Barry continued his service at sea and was injured while aboard the ship Alliance during its battle with the HBMS Atlanta and Trepassy near Newfoundland in 1781.  He took a brief sabbatical from sea life starting in 1783.  After the Naval Act of 1794, President George Washington asked Captain Barry to return to service and commissioned Captain Barry as the first officer in the newly-formed United States Navy.  After that commission, Captain Barry became Commodore Barry.

 

Captain Barry’s activities during his sabbatical spanning from 1783-1794 are not well-documented.  However, it is possible that he turned his talents to another discipline – education.  In 1785, Reverend William White founded the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia.  Some sources suggest that Reverend White approached Captain Barry about becoming a teacher at the Episcopal Academy.  Despite having no formal education, Captain Barry accepted, drawing upon the knowledge he gained while at sea.  Captain Barry had already solidified his place in American history with his naval accomplishments, he may have made his mark in legal history while teaching at the Episcopal Academy.

 

Philadelphia around the time of the founding of the Episcopal Academy

On May 31, 1790, at the urging of many, including another Friday History Minute subject Noah Webster, Jr., the United States Congress passed the first federal copyright law.  At its inception, the law protected only books, maps, and charts, and copyrights lasted fourteen years and were renewable for an additional fourteen years.  On June 9, 1790, John Barry received the first federal copyright, signed by President Washington, for Barry’s book, The Philadelphia Spelling Book: Arranged Upon a Plan Entirely New, Adapted to the Capacities of Children, and Designed as an Immediate Improvement in Spelling and Reading the English Language; the Whole Being Recommended by Several Eminent Teachers, as the Most Useful Performance to Expedite the Instruction of Youth.

 

 

The Title Page of the Philadelphia Spelling Book, as it is more commonly called

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are no sources definitively proving Captain John Barry was the same John Barry who registered the first copyright.  However, the similarities between the facts about Captain Barry and John Barry are striking – according to historical documents, both were from Ireland, and both settled in the same Philadelphia neighborhood.  Reverend White officiated Captain Barry’s marriage to his second wife, Sally, who was Episcopalian.  Further, the time that John Barry is listed as a teacher at the Episcopal Academy matches those years Captain Barry was not at sea and living in Philadelphia.  Finally, it is reported that three of Commodore Barry’s enlisted men were from the Episcopal Academy; the biography of one of those men, Navy Admiral Charles Stewart, is where most of the information regarding Commodore Barry’s time at the Episcopal Academy seems to originate.  Who’s to say?

 

Sources:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-06-09-0106090160-story.html

http://www.famousdaily.com/history/philadelphia-spelling-book-first-copyrighted.html

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

In Defense of Mobsters

On July 20, 1921, newly-minted attorney Jessie Levy took the bench in Marion County, Indiana, as the first female judge pro tem.  The event seemed mostly ceremonial, as she was on the bench for a mere thirty minutes and heard one case involving the theft of Mr. Rage Ajamie’s pants by Mr. Bennett Cook.  While Cook denied he had stolen the pants, Judge Pro Tem Levy found him guilty because he wore the stolen pants to court on the day of his trial.  Judge Pro Tem Levy fined Cook $1 and sentenced him to thirty days in jail.  This is one of the first of many noteworthy events in the extraordinary life of Jessie Levy.

 

Jessie Levy was born on July 6, 1898, in Senjy, Poland, which was occupied by Russia at the time.  She and her family were Orthodox Jews and were persecuted under the Russian occupation, so they immigrated to the United States in 1904, eventually ending up in South Bend, Indiana.  Levy did well in school, but had to leave high school at sixteen so that she could get a job to support her family.  She began working as a typist for a local lawyer, which is likely when her love for the law was born.

 

Jessie Levey, around the time of her law school graduation

Levy attended Indiana University Law School, then still in its relative infancy, and graduated on June 30, 1921, with an L.L.B.  Admission to practice law in the State of Indiana was going through a transition at the time.  As I noted in my piece about Bessie Eaglesfield (include link), the practice of admitting someone to the bar had been handled at the county level, with some counties being more amenable to admitting women than others.  These bar admissions did not require formal education, and instead were based on the good character of the applicant as attested by a practicing attorney, often someone the applicant had worked for in a type of legal apprenticeship.  When Levy was admitted to the Bar, the State had just started to require a degree to practice as an attorney.  This change in policy led to a sharply worded exchange in the Opinions section of the South Bend Tribune between Levy and another woman, Maxine Ryer, both of whom claimed to be the youngest female attorney in Indiana.  (Ryer was the younger of the two, but had not finished law school)

 

Soon after her graduation from law school, Levy partnered with John J. Shusler to form the firm of Levy & Shusler, a firm that would endure for the remainder of Levy and Shusler’s lives.  The firm concentrated on estate work and divorces, though Levy soon realized that criminal defense work was much more lucrative.  In the late 1920s, Levy defended Earl “The Kid” Northern, a bank robber.  She was not successful in getting Northern acquitted, but she was able to spare him a sentence of life imprisonment by arguing the majority of his criminal history occurred while he was still a juvenile.  Northern introduced Levy to his younger sister, Mary Kinder, whom Levy would later defend against charges of what amounted to aiding and abetting a criminal based on evidence that Kinder drove the getaway car after a bank robbery involving her boyfriend, “Handsome” Harry Pierpont.

 

Levy with "Handsome" Harry Pierpont

In 1934, Levy made headlines when she appeared as lead defense counsel for Pierpont, a member of John Dillinger’s gang, during his trial for the murder of Sheriff Jesse Sarber of Lima, Ohio, who was shot when Pierpont and two others broke Dillinger out of jail in late 1933.  Levy was hired the night before the trial began because Pierpont’s previous lawyer quit when he learned that he could not be both a defense attorney and a city solicitor.  Levy, along with another legal female trailblazer, Bess Robbins, defended not only Pierpont, but also two other men accused of the murder, Charles Makley and Russell Clark.  Court transcripts reveal Levy’s wit and legal acumen; they also reveal that the prosecutor in the case was fairly misogynist, implying in statements that women didn’t know the law like men did.  He also insinuated to the jury that Levy was there to seduce them or the judge.

 

Multiple eyewitnesses identified Pierpont as the triggerman in Sheriff Sarber’s murder.  He was convicted and sentenced to the electric chair.  Makley and Clark were also convicted and sentenced to the electric chair and life imprisonment, respectively.  Levy appealed Pierpont’s conviction, arguing (1) that he was unduly prejudiced when he was required to appear before the jury in shackles and (2) he was denied a public trial because anyone wishing to enter the courtroom had to first secure a pass “signed by either the judge or the Brigadier General in command of the militia, or both.”  Pierpont v. State, 49 Ohio App. 77, 86 (1934).  The Ohio Court of Appeals rejected the arguments and affirmed Pierpont’s conviction for murder.  Id. at 87.  Levy sought transfer to the Ohio Supreme Court, which was denied on September 26, 1934.  Pierpont v. State, 128 Ohio St. 572 (1934).

 

Jessie Levy arguing in the Pierpont trial

Levy was prepared to take the case to the United States Supreme Court, as she had been granted permission to appear before it in preparation for Pierpont’s appeal on May 28, 1934, making her the first woman from Indiana to do so.  However, Pierpont requested that she cease further legal action, and allow him to accept his fate.  Four days prior to the Ohio Supreme Court decision, Pierpont and Makley attempted to escape the Ohio State Penitentiary using fake guns carved from soap and painted black with shoe polish.  They were unsuccessful in their endeavor; Makley was killed and Pierpont was severely wounded in the ensuing gunfire.  Pierpont had to be carried to the electric chair on October 17, 1934, as some of the bullets from the escape attempt had struck his spine, rendering him unable to walk.  It is reported that the Ohio court actually moved up his execution date so he could be executed in the electric chair before he died of his other injuries.

 

Levy at work during the Pierpont trial. Note the man with the gun in the background providing security.

Levy returned to practice in Indianapolis and continued criminal defense work until 1940, when she developed a brain tumor.  Treatment was successful, but she decided to step back from the stressful world of criminal court and focus again on family and estate law.  A few years later, she married her law partner, Shusler, but she kept her maiden name professionally.  On December 19, 1969, Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar declared that day “Jessie Levy Shusler Day” to honor not only the achievements mentioned above, but also Levy’s accomplishments as the first female librarian of the Indiana Supreme Court Library and the first President of the Indiana Women Lawyers Association.  Levy died on October 31, 1977, less than two years after the passing of her husband and lifelong law partner, and she is reported to have worked until the day she died.

 

Levy in her later years

 

 

 

Sources

https://dmtesta.com/jessie-levy

https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/jesse-levy/

https://crimereads.com/crime-fighting-broad-jessie-levy-defender-of-the-dillinger-gang/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

In Defense of a Monster

On January 25, 1971, Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Leslie Van Houten were convicted of multiple counts of first-degree murder for their parts in the Tate-LaBianca murders which occurred in August 1969.  The prosecutor was Vincent Bugliosi, who would go on to write a best-selling book about the trial called Helter Skelter.  Less well-known in legal lore is Manson’s defense counsel, Irving Kanarak, who has an interesting story of his own.

 

Manson and Kanarak at the defense table
Manson and Kanarak at the defense table

Kanarak was born on May 12, 1920, in Seattle, Washington.  He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Washington and began his career as an aerospace engineer for North American Aviation, a position which required high security clearance because employees were responsible for designing aircraft for the United States government.  In 1953, Kanarak and a colleague filed a patent for stabilized fuming nitric acid, a fuel additive with a low freezing point used in liquid propellants in rockets.  However, before the patent could be issued, the United States government removed Kanarak’s security clearance because it was rumored Kanarak was a communist sympathizer.  While he was reinstated a little over a year later, Kanarak successfully sued the United States government for lost wages in Kanarak v. U.S., 314 F.2d 802 (3rd Cir. 1963).

 

In the time his case was pending, Kanarak began and completed law school at Loyola University and was admitted to the California Bar in 1957.  Kanarak soon developed a reputation as a tough criminal defense attorney, though many prosecutors would contend his constant objections were abusive.  In 1970, Charles Manson hired Kanarak as his defense attorney after Manson’s first defense attorney, Ronald Hughes, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

 

Kanarak (second from left) with Manson's defense team before Hughes' mysterious disappearance (Hughes is on the far right with the beard).
Kanarak (second from left) with Manson's defense team before Hughes' mysterious disappearance (Hughes is on the far right with the beard).

Kanarak upheld his reputation, and then some.  By the third day of the trial, Kanarak had reportedly objected over two hundred times.  He was jailed twice during the trial for contempt of court.  He insisted Manson was not guilty of the murders and instead was being put on trial because of his lifestyle.  Kanarak’s closing argument in the Manson case lasted seven days, which the judge in the case characterized as “less of an argument and more of a filibuster.”  In Prosecutor Bugliosi’s closing argument, he called Kanarak the “Toscanini of Tedium.”

 

Kanarak continued to practice law until health problems led to his resignation from the California Bar in 1990.  He passed away in 2020, outliving his famous client Manson by three years.  A staunch believer in the constitutional right to counsel, Kanarak said, when asked to reflect on his work on the Manson case, “I would defend a client I knew was guilty of horrific crimes.  They have to be proved guilty.  I’ve had cases where people were guilty as hell but they couldn’t prove it.  And if they can’t prove it, he’s not guilty.  That’s American justice.”

Kanarak at a press conference during the Manson trial
Kanarak at a press conference during the Manson trial

 

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/irving-kanarek-dead.html

https://www.charlesmanson.com/defense/irving-kanarek/

https://www.grunge.com/1100500/what-happened-to-irving-kanarek-from-the-charles-manson-case/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Casedo v1.9 Release Announcement

Casedo v1.9 Beta Release Announcement

UPDATE 2023.03.17 - Though many of our current users have switched to Casedo v1.9 without issue, we have found several low risk bugs in the software which we think need to be fixed before this version becomes the standard release. We've therefore taken the difficult decision to put this version back into beta. If you'd like to try Casedo v1.9.0 you can download the Mac version here or download the Windows version here.

Following on from the additional colour-tagging options in the last upgrade, Casedo is delighted to announce the release of the latest software upgrade. Casedo version 1.9 offers our customers four distinct new features which each add a new element to the already feature-rich toolset.

 

Export individual folders and documents

Casedo has been the go-to bundling tool for many lawyers for several years, and whilst the options for exporting an entire case are strong, including complex pagination features and feature-rich Table of Contents, until now there has been some frustration at the inability to export individual files and folders without mucking about with the Index first. You no longer need to - now your can simply right click on a document or folder (in the Index or the Desk Space) and export it as you would a bundle. For more information read this article.

 

Casedo Casefile lock to prevent opening of a Casefile by more than one user at a time, when saved on shared storage

Most of us have more that one computer, perhaps using a desktop at work and a laptop the rest of the time. We understand this, we're happy for licence holders to have Casedo installed on more than one computer (see the EULA for details). The convenient way to work with this set up is to save your Casedo casefiles in shared folders using services such as OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or on bespoke in-company systems.

This works well if you're the only one working on a casefile. However, until now it has been trickier with multiple users as there has been no way to know if the Casedo casefile is in use by a team member or assistant. This can lead Casedo to making multiple cloned copies of the same casefile.

To overcome this we have created a lock system that prevents a Casedo casefile being opened by more than one user concurrently, and which tells the locked-out user who is currently using the casefile. Implementation of this has necessitated a slightly different experience when Casedo is opened for the first time after installation, users now need to add contact details. To know how this new feature works in more detail read this article, and to find out how 'opening Casedo for the first time' has changed, read this.

 

Import failure warning

Sometimes documents won't import into Casedo as expected. Sometimes Casedo doesn't recognise the file. Whilst there are workarounds for PDFs and Word Documents, it would be great to know when this occurs, especially if you are importing multiple documents at a time. Casedo v1.9 includes a failed-to-import notification so that you know when this has happened and can take steps to fix it. For more information, take a look at this article.

 

Undo for moving documents in the Index and Desk Space

Whilst to date annotations can be added and removed in Casedo, mistaken movement in the Index and Desk Space on the left hand side of the Casedo workspace could not. We've now added CTRL+Z (Windows) / CMD+Z (Mac) to undo up to five movement actions in both the Index and Desk Space. This is a huge help when you accidently move a folder full of documents to the wrong place! For more information, read this.

 

Casedo v1.9

We feel that the above four features add substantially to Casedo's overall offer - helping people manage multiple documents in a single space, enabling them to organise, annotate, think, advise and pick up where they left off simply and easily. In addition to these obvious changes, we have improved some back end processes. This includes the basic importing feature, which is continually improving, thanks to diligent users sharing their failed document imports with us to fix.

For further details, take a look at the Release Notes.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

Before Rosa

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, tired from a long day at work, stepped on a bus that would change history.  Her refusal to move to the rear of the bus to accommodate boarding white passengers is generally considered the spark that lit the flame of the civil rights movement.  However, Rosa’s civil disobedience likely stoked a fire that had already been lit fifteen years earlier by Pauli Murray.

 

Pauli's family in 1912 or 1913. She is the toddler on the upper left. Pauli's mother died when Pauli was three years old, and she was sent to live with relatives in North Carolina after her father was institutionalized.
Pauli's family in 1912 or 1913. She is the toddler on the upper left. Pauli's mother died when Pauli was three years old, and she was sent to live with relatives in North Carolina after her father was institutionalized.

Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910, a child of various ancestry, including white slave owners and enslaved people.  After graduating from high school in 1926, Pauli attended Hunter College and received a degree in English Literature in 1933.  Pauli worked various jobs with the National Urban League and other organizations supporting civil rights.  It was during this time that Pauli met Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom she became a lifelong friend.

 

Young Pauli Murray
Young Pauli Murray

In March 1940, Pauli and a friend boarded a bus in Richmond, Virginia, that was bound for North Carolina.  The seats in the back of the bus were broken, so Pauli and her friend sat closer to the front.  The bus driver asked them to move, and they politely refused and remained seated.  The bus driver called the police and the two were arrested.  The NAACP, hoping to use Pauli’s arrest as a vehicle to legally challenge the constitutionality of segregated interstate travel, took interest in Pauli’s case.  The prosecutor, likely realizing the implications of a constitutional challenge to the police action, did not prosecute Pauli for refusing to vacate her seat on the bus.  Rather, the prosecutor charged Pauli with disorderly conduct for alleged conduct that occurred after she was taken off of the bus.  This seemingly took the case out of the purview of the NAACP’s challenge.

 

Excerpt from a North Carolina newspaper reporting Pauli's arrest.
Excerpt from a North Carolina newspaper reporting Pauli's arrest.

In 1941, Pauli began attending Howard University School of Law, where she was the only female student.  Based on her struggles with classmates and professors, Pauli coined the term “Jane Crow,” an allusion to “Jim Crow,” to describe not only the racism but the sexism she experienced throughout her lifetime.  Upon graduating at top of her class at Howard, Pauli was eligible to finish her law studies at Harvard University.  However, Pauli was denied admission to Harvard, despite multiple letters of support from influential political figures including President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Pauli therefore finished her law degree at the University of California-Berkley School of Law and was admitted to the California Bar in 1945.

 

Pauli's graduating class at Howard University School of Law. Pauli is circled.
Pauli's graduating class at Howard University School of Law. Pauli is circled.

In 1946, Pauli was hired as California’s first African-American deputy attorney general.  In 1950, Pauli wrote “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” a collection and critique of state segregation laws across the United States.  NAACP chief counsel (and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall called the book the “bible of the civil rights movement.”  Pauli’s work formed the basis for Marshall’s argument before the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), a decision which fulfilled the terms of a bet Pauli made with her law professor during her years at Howard Law - that Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), would be overturned within twenty-five years.

 

In 1956, Pauli published her biography, “Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family.”  Soon thereafter, she began working for the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton, and Garrison, where she met Office Manager Irene “Rene” Barlow, who would become her lifelong partner.  During her time with Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, Pauli crossed paths with another future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who interned for the firm.  In 1960, Pauli briefly left the United States to teach law in Ghana.  Upon her return, Pauli enrolled in Yale Law School, where she became the first African-American to earn a Doctor of Juridical Sciences degree.

 

Pauli at the release of her book, "Proud Shoes"
Pauli at the release of her book, "Proud Shoes"

In 1965, Pauli co-authored “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” 34 Geo. L. Rev. 232 (1965) with Mary Eastwood.  The article drew comparisons between Jim Crow laws and laws that discriminated against women and formed the basis for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s argument in Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), the first case in which the United States Supreme Court recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause applied to gender, striking down an Idaho law prohibiting women from serving as administrators of an estate.

 

In 1966, Pauli was part of a group of forty-nine women who founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), a feminist organization which was, at the time, focused on the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.  From 1968-1973, Pauli taught various courses on African-American studies and women’s studies at Brandeis University.  In 1973, Pauli’s partner, Rene, died of a brain tumor and Pauli stepped back from her academic career.

 

Pauli in her study.
Pauli in her study.

Pauli resurfaced as a student at the General Theological Seminary, where she received a Master of Divinity in 1976.  In 1977, Pauli became the first African-American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest.  Her first Eucharist was celebrated in the church where her grandmother, a child of an enslaved woman and a slave owner, was baptized.  Pauli served in the Episcopal church until her death in 1985.  Pauli and Rene are buried together in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Sources:

https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-many-lives-of-pauli-murray

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

The Printer's Legal Woes

Many alive today, when they hear the name “Gutenberg,” automatically think of the printing press or the Gutenberg Bible.  However, when Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was indebted and penniless when he died on February 3, 1468.  He never profited from his printing efforts and lived on a church-appointed stipend given in appreciation of his printing efforts.  But let’s unpack all of that and start at the beginning.

An illustrated depiction of Johannes Gutenberg

 

The exact date of Gutenberg’s birth is unknown.  Most historians place it sometime between 1394 and 1404.  The city of Mainz, Germany, where he was born and spent most of his life, declared the symbolic date of his birth to be June 24, 1400.  His family was well-placed in German society.  They were part of the merchant class and Gutenberg studied the trade of goldsmithing from his father, who worked at the local church’s mint.  Around 1411, the family moved to Eltville am Rhein or Strasbourg.  Little is known of Gutenberg’s life during this approximately fifteen-year period.  Gutenberg resurfaces in the annals of history in 1436, through a legal record indicating Ennel zur eiernen Tür sued Gutenberg for “breach of promise of marriage.”  The verdict in that proceeding is unknown, though there is no record of Gutenberg being married.

An example of the Chinese movable type process invented in 1040 by Bi Sheng

 

After an unsuccessful venture selling polished mirrors advertised to capture the holy light from religious relics, Gutenberg turned his entrepreneurial efforts towards printing and the development of a movable printing press.  Gutenberg was likely unaware of the movable printing press that had been in use in China since 1040, though there are historical references to European explorers returning from China with materials printed on such a printing press.  During the development of his printing press, Gutenberg sought to keep his “invention” secret.  In 1438, as part of a legal proceeding in which the heirs of Gutenberg’s business partner at the time sought to be named partners in the business venture in which the deceased had entered, court papers indicated Gutenberg and his business partners advanced money to a carpenter to build a printing press and to a goldsmith for printing materials.  Gutenberg won the lawsuit, but his “secret” was out.

Replica of Gutenberg's Printing Press

 

Gutenberg resurfaced in Mainz in October 1448, borrowing money for his enterprise from his brother-in-law.  By 1450, Gutenberg’s reputation had grown, and he partnered with wealthy financier Joannes Faustus.  Faustus loaned Gutenberg around 1600 guilders (approximately $96,000 in today’s money) to complete his project.  Gutenberg hired Peter Schöffer as a printing assistant; Schöffer is believed to have designed early typefaces.  Around the same time, the movable type printing press churned out its first product, a poem.  Early works printed also included the 31-line Indulgence granted by Pope Nicholas V and issued in Erfurt, Germany, on October 22, 1454, and a Latin grammar book.  Realizing the profit to be made, Gutenberg moved on to a printed item that was very popular at the time – the Bible.

 

Gutenberg set out to print the Bible not only for profit, but to address the issues prevalent at the time with handwritten versions of the work; these handwritten versions would often have the individual writer’s commentary on the subjects therein weaved into the text, which is likely part of the reason there are so many versions of the same verses of the Bible today.  Gutenberg and Schöffer worked from 1453-55 to create approximately 180 copies of the “42-line Bible,” known today as the Gutenberg Bible.

A contemporary portrait of Joannes Faustus with "his" Bible

 

But it wasn’t known as the Gutenberg Bible upon its initial release – instead, shortly after the completion of the Bible’s printing, Faustus decided he needed his investment back immediately, plus 6% interest.  He sued Gutenberg in the Mainz Archbishop’s court, alleging Gutenberg misused the funds Faustus had advanced for the “project of the books.”  The court ruled in favor of Faustus. The court granted control over Gutenberg’s printing shop and half of the printed Bibles as payment.  When the Bibles were released, Faustus and Schöffer’s names were listed as printers; Gutenberg’s legacy would not be realized and publicized until approximately three hundred years after his death, when historian Johann David Kohler began researching documents from Gutenberg’s time to prove Gutenberg’s relationship to the famous Bible.  It would seem there was some recognition of Gutenberg’s accomplishments at the time he was alive – on January 18, 1465, Mainz’s Archbishop Adolph von Nassau named Gutenberg a “gentleman of the court,” a title which provided a monetary stipend, an annual court outfit, 2180 liters of grain and 2000 liters of wine tax-free.

One of the remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible, housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas

 

Of the original 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible, only 49 still exist, some in various stages of completion.  The Library of Congress, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City all have complete copies of the work.  The closest copy is housed by the Lilly Library on IU’s Bloomington campus; it is the other half of a copy on display in Mons, Belgium, and was donated by George Amos Poole, who was a founding member of Rand McNally and Company.

 

Sources:

https://www.thoughtco.com/johannes-gutenberg-and-the-printing-press-1991865

https://www.printmuseum.org/gutenberg-press

https://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-printing-press/

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

How Bad Was It Really?

On March 1, 1914, the town of Berlin, New Hampshire fell victim to a very serious thunderstorm.  As a result of the storm, the primitive electrical wires outside the home of ten-year-old George Hawkins’ home became crossed, sending a strong electrical current into the house.  The next morning, George’s father, Charles, told him to start a fire in the fireplace located in the main room of the family’s home.  Before doing so, George reached up to turn on the electric light above the wood-burning stove, and an electric spark from the light badly burned his right hand.

 

The severity of the burn is disputed.  Some sources indicate it left a scar that ran across George’s palm, had a raised ridge about the size of “half a lead pencil,” and caused him minimal discomfort.  Other sources reported the hand was grossly disfigured, with deep scar tissue from an injury that extended into the ligaments of the hand, making the hand, as George aged and grew, to become contracted and dysfunctional.  Regardless of the actual state of George’s hand, the burn was severe enough for his father Charles to file suit against Cascade Light & Power Co., the local utility company.  It was also significant enough to warrant further inspection by multiple physicians, including Dr. Edward R. B. McGee.

Dr. Edward R. B. McGee

Dr. McGee graduated from medical school in 1904 and opened a practice in Berlin, New Hampshire shortly thereafter.  He was likely the Hawkins’ family doctor around the time of George’s injury, but left to join the WWI effort shortly thereafter.  Dr. McGee served as a surgeon at Camp Merritt, New Jersey during the war, and returned to Berlin in 1919.  In 1921, Charles took George to see Dr. McGee, though the primary reason for the appointment is not known.  However, it was during that appointment that Dr. McGee likely proposed that he be allowed to graft skin onto George’s palm to improve the condition and functionality of the hand.

 

The first of three operations on George Hawkins’ hand began in January 1922.  The first removed some of the existing scar tissue to create a palette for the graft.  During the second, Dr. McGee attached George’s hand to his chest, which was the location of the skin to be grafted to his palm.  The third and final operation detached George’s hand from his chest and assured the new skin and corresponding blood vessels had properly attached to George’s hand.

 

The procedure caused further disfigurement of George’s hand.  Besides the scarring and “surplus tissue,” George now had hair on the palm of his hand.  He was also unable to perform many common tasks, including shooting a gun and working at the local mill.  George sued Dr. McGee for breach of contract.

 

The rest of the story is likely familiar to every lawyer.  A jury (the second to hear the case; the first trial ended in a hung jury) awarded George damages on his breach of contract claim against Dr. McGee, based, in part, on Dr. McGee’s alleged statement that he would “guarantee to make the hand a hundred per cent perfect hand” or a “hundred per cent good hand.”  The New Hampshire Supreme Court ultimately reversed the jury’s decision and returned the case for a third trial in Hawkins v. McGee, 146 A. 641, 643 (N.H. 1929).  The third trial resulted in a jury award of $1400 in damages to George, a claim Dr. McGee pursued with his insurance company that resulted in the litigation in McGee v. U.S. Fidelity & Guarantee Co., 53 F.2d 953 (1st Cir. 1931).

 

George went on to live a relatively uneventful life.  He married late in life and did not have children.  He passed away of a heart attack at fifty-four.  Dr. McGee went on to be mayor of Berlin, New Hampshire for one term, and directed McGee’s Symphony Orchestra, which toured portions of New Hampshire.  The Hawkins family did not become aware of the notoriety of George’s case until his niece was a law student in the 1960s and encountered Hawkins v. McGee in her Intro to Contracts class.

 

Sources

https://info.cooley.edu/blog/another-perspective-on-dr-mcgee

https://www.nhmagazine.com/the-case-of-the-hairy-hand/

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by academic researchers and law students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's a simple drag and drop interface which allows the user to treat their electronic documents like a paper record, with annotations and bookmarks while enhancing the user's ability to cross reference documents. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

The Seventh

On October 6, 1949, a federal court sentenced Iva Toguri D’Aquino to ten years imprisonment for treason.  The court also ordered her to pay a fine of $10,000 and stripped her of her American citizenship.  At the time, she was only the seventh person to have ever been convicted and sentenced for treason in the history of the United States.  Her trial lasted twelve weeks and included approximately forty prosecution witnesses.  Originally indicted on eight charges of treason, the jury found D’Aquino guilty of treason based on the accusation that she “on a day during October 1944, . . . defendant, at Tokyo, Japan, in a broadcasting studio of the Broadcasting Corporation of Japan, did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships.”

D'Aquino during a "Tokyo Rose" broadcast

 

D’Aquino is more widely known as “Tokyo Rose,” the moniker given to female broadcasters in Japan during World War II.  D’Aquino traveled to Japan in early 1941 to care for her aunt and, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, was denied return to the United States.  She began working with Radio Tokyo in 1943 and was placed as an announcer on a radio program called “Zero Hour” in November 1943.  The program was part of an increased effort to disseminate Japanese propaganda to American GIs.

 

D’Aquino was known by the pseudonym “Orphan Ann,” a reference to either a term used to describe American GIs in the Pacific theater (“Orphans of the Pacific”) or the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie.”  She read scripts written at first by Japanese propogandists and later by three Allied POWs employed by the Japanese government.  After the war, two American reporters, Harry Brundidge and Clark Lee, offered a reward for an interview with “Tokyo Rose,” a female broadcaster who had become famous for her allegedly morale-killing broadcasts.

 

The reward was equivalent to roughly a year’s wages in Japan, so D’Aquino accepted the journalists’ offer and gave an interview.  Brundidge refused to pay D’Aquino and turned on her, asserting her interview with him was a confession.  Authorities arrested her on September 5, 1945.  She was held in jail for a year until she was released because American authorities could not find evidence that she worked to assist the Japanese propaganda effort.  However, she was arrested in 1948 and extradited to the United States on charges that she committed treason by “adhering to, and giving aid and comfort to, the Imperial Government of Japan during World War II.”

D'Aquino's mugshot, 1946

 

D’Aquino served six years of her ten-year sentence and was released in 1956.  When she was released, she moved to Chicago to work with her family.  Twenty years later, investigative journalist Ron Yates discovered two witnesses in D’Aquino’s trial committed perjury because they had been threatened with treason charges if they did not lie about D’Aquino’s activities during World War II.  On January 19, 1977, on his last day as President, Jimmy Carter granted D’Aquino a full and unconditional pardon and restored her American citizenship.  D’Aquino died in 2006.

 

Sources:

https://www.history.com/news/how-tokyo-rose-became-wwiis-most-notorious-propagandist

https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/iva-toguri-daquino-and-tokyo-rose

https://www.courthousenews.com/tokyo-rose-the-woman-wrongfully-convicted-of-treason/

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by Academic Researchers and Students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's simple drag and drop interface makes teasing out the threads of meaning brainwork rather than and exercise in document management. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

Webster's World of Words

On October 16, 1758, Noah Webster, Jr. was born in Hartford, Connecticut.  Webster graduated from Yale College in 1778, and passed the bar soon thereafter.  After he was unsuccessful in finding work as a lawyer, he turned his focus to education – specifically, lexicography.

Noah Webster

 

In 1783, Webster published the first of three volumes of his first work “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.”  The work sold many copies, as it became a standard textbook in most schools. However, Webster saw little money from those sales.  This lack of profit was due in part to the absence of a federal copyright law – as the volumes could be reproduced by any printer, few people actually purchased them from Webster.

 

In an effort to profit from possible future works, Webster lobbied the new United States Congress to pass a federal copyright law.  Congress passed the First Copyright Act on May 31, 1790.  The Act amended Section 8 of Article 1 of the United States Constitution, reserved for the Powers of Congress, adding the responsibility to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”  The first copyrights could only be issued to books, maps, and charts and lasted fourteen years.  Works were registered in the U.S. District Court of the state where the author or creator lived.

 

Early Handwritten Drafts of Webster's Dictionary

Webster published his first dictionary, “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” in 1806.  This dictionary is probably best known for separating the traditional British ways of spelling from the preferred American spellings.  The Compendious Dictionary changed the British “-our” to the American “-or” in words such as “humour” and “colour.”  It also reflected the change from “-ce” to “-se” in words such as “defence” and “offence” and dropped the “-k” in words such as “publick” and “musick.”  In addition, the Compendious Dictionary recorded words used in “American English” speech that had not been added to a dictionary, such as “appellate,” “advocate,” “vaccine,” “census,” and “whiskey.”

 

Webster published his magnum opus, “An American Dictionary of the English Language” in two volumes in 1828.  The work included 70,000 words, including curse words.  Some were critical of Webster’s inclusion of vulgar words such as “buggery,” but he noted that he took out other similar words such as “bum” and “fart.”

 

The Title Page of the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster

In an effort to further protect his works, Webster lobbied for a longer copyright term. In 1831, Congress extended the copyright term from fourteen to twenty-eight years.

 

Webster died in 1843, while working on the second version of his “An American Dictionary of the English Language.”  George and Charles Merriam, who operated a printing and bookselling business in Springfield, Massachusetts, obtained the rights to created revised versions of Webster’s first and second versions of the dictionary, creating the Merriam-Webster name we know today.

 

Sources:

https://noahwebsterhouse.org/noahwebsterhistory/

https://www.notablebiographies.com/Tu-We/Webster-Noah.html

https://thegreatestbooks.org/authors/6937

 

 

 

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by Academic Researchers and Students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's simple drag and drop interface makes teasing out the threads of meaning brainwork rather than and exercise in document management. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Woman in front of a laptop frustrated by her workflow management

Current legal document workflow management isn’t working

You need the right tools to minimise the document admin you’re not aware you’re doing. Then you can get on with your actual work, your deep work, (not the preparation). Part Three

 

In this series I’ve been trying to break down legal document workflows. I want to show how legal professionals could minimise their document admin time by choosing the right tools. By doing so, they can improve their workflow management, cut occupational stress and improve productivity.

In the first article in the series, I attempted to get to the heart of the actual work that legal professionals do, rather than the top line answer of “I’m a lawyer”, because only in knowing that could you successfully choose the tools you need.

In the second part of the series it may have looked as if I’d headed off at a tangent by concentrating on paper bundles. However, my premise was that we have a tendency to assume legacy ways of working are no longer fit for purpose. That we have nothing to learn from them. I wanted to show that the paper bundle has for a long time (centuries?) been an excellent tool for a variety of reasons. It continues to be particularly good for focused work, even with the admitted downsides of physical production, replication and archive. My argument being that ‘digital’ bundles, such as they are, tend to have solved the downsides of paper bundles without managing to adequately bring on board the upsides of paper bundles in terms of efficiency and productivity.   At the end of the last article, I touched on how you might now be interacting with your papers. In this third part of the series I elaborate on this theme.

 

Why your current document workflow isn’t working

We can’t improve our productivity if we’re not aware that the way we work is inefficient. The extra steps you take to get your work done are not just administrative but are a workflow management and time management issue. Let’s take the paper bundle as the base case for document working, and step to digital from there.

Paper bundles: the good, the bad and the ugly

In the last part of this series, we touched on the good side of working with paper bundles

  • the ability to focus, to work through documents by utilising non-linear reading (jumping tab to tab)
  • to pick up where you left off
  • to have a ready archive at the end of the process.

The downsides are obvious and common to many legacy physical tools and workflows, be they collaboration tools (of which paper bundles are one), or not. Paper bundles are

  • time consuming to create
  • time consuming to append
  • extremely time consuming to replicate
  • high risk in terms of loss / damage

The above negative aspects of bundles above have ‘digitise my workflow’ written all over them. And these processes have, by and large, beet successfully digitised.

 

What’s wrong with current legal document workflow management

1. Case & document workflow management systems are great for managing documents not using them

Document management is hugely important to any business, particularly in law where client data is the bread and butter of the business. But in terms of understanding and digesting the information at hand, ‘document management’ is unhelpful. Legal professionals shouldn’t be ‘managing’ documents, that is for support staff etc. to deal with. Legal professionals need to be using documents as part of their work.   The current issue is that ‘document management’, by which I mean identification, storage, risk management etc, has dominated over the ability to use documents. For the sake of identification and good record management, documents are stored securely and individually. The focus is to not lose documents, in other words to manage documents, and to be able to identify them easily so they can be found and retrieved quickly and then used.   This is great for a database of records (whatever those records are). However, it is very poor workflow when it comes to using those documents.   You get a better sense of how inefficient this is for using the documents for work by looking at the hard copy analogy. If we imagine that in a paper-bundle, instead of putting all the relevant documents into a single paper bundle, you bundled each document individually. Not only that, but also bound them, titled them and tagged them individually. Follow that you kept them on a shelf so that any time you wanted to look at the document you had to get up from your desk to go and fetch it. If you needed to digest 58 documents relating to a case, you’d have to get 58 different documents off the shelf (and put them back at the end of the day).   This cumbersome workflow doesn’t even look at the question of how you would signpost between documents?

2. PDF Readers and Editors are great for producing documents, not reading them

For PDFs we look to PDF Readers and Editors. If you are faced with emails, PDFs and Word documents then you need to Alt + Tab (switch) back and forth between them, and even if you had all your documents in PDF format, how are you going to open those 58 documents (in the example above)? In 58 tabs across the top of your screen? How are you going to link between them, let alone read them. Non-linear reading becomes an exercise in will power with workflow like this!   What if you are technically proficient enough to create a single bookmarked PDF of all the documents you need? That’s great, a bit like producing a professionally bound hard copy document. But what happens if, as is bound to happen, you need to add a document at the last minute, recreating that magnificent monolithic document is a long and tedious process.   None of this is an issue with a paper bundle, except maybe the cumbersome addition of new documents.

3. Creating a bundle is a separate process

And then given how you work with documents, how do you create an electronic (or even paper) bundle if you need to go to arbitration or to court? You need to create a ‘bundle’ from scratch. Back in the paper days you would already have a bundle to hand, you had begun to make it from day one of the case. It built up over time, and then, when it needed to be shared with the other side or the court, you had to make a clean copy, but at the very least you had a copy to clone.   But now, none of this. Not only does one spend a huge amount of time opening up individual files, and having to search across them individually. Making links between them is tiresome, and making a bundle another chore in itself. It’s as if all the benefits of the paper bundle have been taken away just to save time and money in the creation of a paper bundle. One set of inefficiencies have been replaced with another.

The Solution

This is the current situation, and many are yet to notice that this is even a problem. It so ingrained is it into our workflows and workflow management systems. However, it doesn’t need to be, as I will show in the final part of this series.


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

The Bequest

On June 27, 1829, British mineralogist and chemist James Smithson died.  Smithson was a British mineralogist and chemist who studied natural phenomena including the mineral calamine, early electricity, and the chemical constitution of a lady’s tear.  He left his sizable estate to his nephew, Henry Hungerford.  On June 5, 1835, Hungerford died, leaving no heirs.  Smithson’s estate, comprised of approximately $500,000 (this would equal about $15 million in 2021) and various minerals and scientific papers, was bequeathed to the United States upon Hungerford’s death to form, as Smithson noted in his will, “the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

James Smithson, whose bequest funded the Smithsonian Institute in the United States.

 

In 1836, upon learning of Smithson’s bequest, President Andrew Jackson sent former Treasury Secretary Robert Rush to retrieve the donation.  After selling some of Smithson’s investments, Rush returned to the United States with 104,960 gold coins, 8 shillings, 7 pence, which, after being melted and reminted as United States currency, totaled $508,318.46.  Rush also brought with him Smithson’s personal effects, which would be the first donations to the new institution.

 

However, this bequest did not swiftly lead to the formation of the Smithsonian Institution as we know it today.  Congress debated for almost a decade about what Smithson meant by “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” and how the endowment should be used for those purposes.  Some argued Smithson intended the money to be used to form a university, while others interpreted the language to support the formation of a scientific research institute, a national library, or a museum.  Congress also argued about where the Smithsonian Institute should be located and finally settled on Washington, DC.

The "Castle"

 

On August 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed legislation to form the Smithsonian Institution to be governed by a Board of Regents and the Secretary of the Smithsonian.  On February 24, 1847, the Board of Regents approved the seal for the Smithsonian Institution, which was designed by Congressman Robert Dale Owen of Indiana.  Construction on the Smithsonian Institution Building, now known as the “Castle” began in 1849 and opened to the public in 1855.  From there, the Smithsonian Institution, and its collection, grew to what it is today.

 

Unfortunately, in 1865, there was a fire at the Castle, and all of Smithson’s original donations were destroyed.  In 1881, the Arts and Industries Building opened; the first event held there was President James Garfield’s inaugural ball.  In 1889, the National Zoological Park, or the National Zoo, opened with 185 animals including a buffalo, wood chucks, a bald eagle, and black snakes.  The Museum of Natural History followed in 1911, and the National Air Museum in 1946.  In 1964, the National Museum of American History opened, and in 1968, the National Museum of American Art, which includes the National Portrait Gallery, opened in the former Patent Office Building.  The Smithsonian Institution’s most recent museum, the Museum of African American History, opened in 2016.  The Smithsonian Institution encompasses 19 museums and galleries housing 155 million works of art and specimens as well as research facilities and collection affiliates in every state, Puerto Rico, and Panama. ​​​​​

Smithson's Crypt, located inside The Castle

 

But what became of James Smithson, the English scientist whose fortune funded the Smithsonian Institute?  In 1900, then-Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Samuel Langley, discovered that the cemetery in Genoa, Italy, where Smithson was buried in 1829, was scheduled to be destroyed to make way for the expansion of a nearby quarry.  Shortly thereafter, Smithsonian Regent Alexander Graham Bell rallied to inter Smithson within the institution he had helped create.  Bell traveled to Italy and retrieved Smithson’s body.  Bell returned in early 1904 with Smithson’s remains, and, after a number of ceremonies celebrating Smithson, he was entombed in a crypt within the Castle.

 

 

 

Sources:

https://www.si.edu/about/history

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-james-smithsons-money-build-smithsonian-114828409/

https://siarchives.si.edu/history/james-smithson

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by Academic Researchers and Students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's simple drag and drop interface makes teasing out the threads of meaning brainwork rather than and exercise in document management. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


OCR - convert pdf to text with Casedo

Convert PDF to text on the fly with OCR

Right now, new technology is making it easier for lawyers to work with digitised documents. Most lawyers are familiar with pdfs: the standard file format for storing scanned documents, as well as for exchanging them with other parties. On the flip side, if you have ever tried to edit, copy or search through text in such a file, you’ll know just how frustrating pdfs can be to work with.

 

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology changes all of this. Designed with lawyers in mind, Casedo’s OCR feature enables you to convert pdf to text on the flay and so makes unreadable pdfs readable, allowing you to manipulate, search and extract text, just like you would with a Word document.

 

Here’s a closer look at how OCR works, and why this can mean a welcome boost in productivity and reduction in stress levels for lawyers, paralegals and support staff alike.

 

 

What’s the problem with scanned pdfs for lawyers?

 

There are good reasons why pdfs (portable document files) are used frequently within law firms. Originally developed more than two decades ago by Adobe, this file format lets you easily convert both electronic and paper documents into accurate digital versions of the original. Pdf documents are easy to share and to view, thanks to Adobe’s free-to-use Reader plugin. The files themselves are also relatively small, which makes it easier to send via email, and also makes it possible to store vast volumes of scanned documents on the firm’s hard drive.


Scanning and converting a document into a pdf creates an electronic image of the original. The file is non-editable, which can be useful from a security perspective when you need to show that a document is a true copy of the original. However, this characteristic also stops you from annotating, copying, searching through and extracting the text: bad news when you need to work on the document.



What does OCR software do?


Optical Character Recognition software changes the way your device processes pdf files. By converting pdf to text it enables the device to actually read the text, rather than treating it as an image.


For you, this means the document is transformed into an editable, machine-readable format.



How can I put OCR software to work?


Here are some of the many situations where OCR can prove especially valuable in law firms and chambers:

 


Post-disclosure investigation


As part of the disclosure and inspection process, you receive a large volume of the other party’s scanned bank statements in pdf format. As part of your investigations, you want to isolate all transactions relating to a particular payee. Rather than printing out the statements and examining them line-by-line with a highlighter, an OCR feature lets you do a text search for the payee and identify all relevant entries in an instant.

 


Expert evidence


Attached to the likes of medical and engineering reports, experts will often attach reference documents, such as research reports and articles from academic journals. These documents can often be dense in nature. Nevertheless, it is generally important to give them consideration for anything that might be especially relevant to the actual expert report and to your client’s case as a whole.


Once you convert PDF to text, OCR allows you to search for the segments of these documents that are likely to be most relevant. It also allows you to easily copy sections and paste them into opinions, correspondence and pleadings.

 


Research


One of the barristers’ chambers you frequently instruct has prepared a handy guide to tax law changes and has sent you a scanned version in pdf format. Some of the contents are directly relevant to a number of your cases. OCR enables you to annotate the document and extract useful sections and charts so you can add them to your casenote file on your case management system.



What are the benefits of OCR for lawyers?


Why should I use this feature to convert PDF to text? OCR can help you in the following ways:

 


Speed


By effectively ‘unlocking’ scanned documents, OCR removes the (frustrating!) requirement of having to retype sections of text contained in scanned documents.


For many of the scanned files lawyers deal, only certain sections of them are specifically relevant to the litigation in hand. As we explored in our article, How lawyers can reduce stress at work with legal tech, as much as 20% of a working day can be wasted in searching for the information you need to get the job done.(1) Trying to identify the relevant parts of huge files can be a big part of this. By letting you search for and then highlight specific areas, you can cut out a lot of this waste.

 


Accuracy


This can be especially relevant when you have large volumes of financial records to analyse. When assessing text manually, even the most experienced lawyer can miss something important. With OCR enabled, you can use the search function in full knowledge that nothing relevant will be missed.

 


Profitability


OCR makes it quicker to work with scanned documents, freeing up your time to devote to more valuable activities such as wider case strategy and building stronger client relationships. What’s more, because it creates less scope for error, there is often greater scope for delegating tasks such as document checking to more junior staff.



How to use Casedo software to convert PDF to text


With Casedo, you can now make unreadable scanned documents readable by following these simple steps:

  • Import the scanned document into the Casedo workspace
  • Right-click the imported file and select ‘Recognise text’
  • The software will then process the text (this can take a minute or two, depending on the size of your pdf)
  • Once the OCR feature has processed the text, you can search and edit it as you would a standard text document.


If you have one or more scanned documents and you want to search for specific words, you can simply import them all into Casedo, apply the OCR feature and search them together or individually. Request a Free Casedo 30 Day Trial today, and how easy it is for yourself.

 

References

  1. Noi, D. (2018). Do workers still waste time searching for information?. [online] Blog.xenit.eu. Available at: https://xenit.eu/do-workers-still-waste-time-searching-for-information/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2022].

 

UPDATED: 2022.11.11


Legal History with Jessica Feature Image

She Did It Her Way

On the afternoon of March 3, 1913, approximately five hundred women from across Indiana marched to the Indiana Statehouse to support a bill recognizing a woman’s right to vote.  Well-known suffragist Grace Julian Clarke was one of the organizers of the protest, which proceeded peacefully into the Statehouse, where each woman offered to pin suffrage ribbons on willing lawmakers, but there were few takers.  The bill ultimately failed and Hoosier women would not be allowed to vote until 1920.  However, the women there that day stood on the shoulders of a woman that is often not mentioned with other Hoosier suffragists such as Clarke and May Wright Sewall.  That woman’s name is Amanda Way.

 

Newspaper Clipping for March 3, 1913, protest at the Indiana Statehouse.

 

Amanda M. Way was born on July 10, 1828, in Winchester, Indiana.  Her family was Quaker and she attended the Union Literary Institute, which is notable for the fact that it was a privately-sponsored school which admitted all students, regardless of race or gender, in a time when Indiana public schools were not required to accept African American students. Way trained as a teacher and worked as such for a period of time.  In 1844, she joined the local chapter of the temperance movement, the Winchester Total Abstinence Society.  She was very active in anti-liquor efforts, though her activity lessened after the deaths of her father and her fiancé in 1849.  Way then worked as a milliner and seamstress to support the remaining members of her family.

The Union Literary Institute in Union City, Indiana

 

Alcohol prohibition was not the only social cause in which Way was heavily involved. On October 14-15, 1851, Way served as vice president over the first Indiana women’s rights convention held in Dublin, Indiana.  In her opening address, Way declared, “unless women demand their rights politically, socially, and financially, they will continue in the future as [they have] in the past.”  The convention was well-attended and led to the formal establishment of the Women’s Rights Association of Indiana.  Way first served as the treasurer of the Women’s Rights Association of Indiana, and later became its president in 1855.

Indiana Historical Marker at the Site of Indiana's First Woman's Rights Commission in Dublin, Indiana.

 

While her involvement in the women’s rights movement was prolific, she is also notorious for her actions in support of the temperance movement.  In March 1854, former Winchester Sheriff Thorton Alexander died of alcoholism, leaving his widow and five children destitute.  Way and other women in the town, including Thorton’s widow, blamed William Page, a Winchester grocer who reportedly sold large quantities of alcohol to Thorton in exchange for the family’s cow and featherbed.  Way and the others thus formed the Winchester Temperance Army.

 

Depiction of Temperance Movement supporters pouring liquor out and destroying a bar.

 

On March 28, Way and her Army went to each liquor proprietor in Winchester and the surrounding area, demanding that each proprietor sign a pledge to stop selling liquor.  Page refused, meeting Way and her Army at the door of his store with a gun.  Way had her own firearm, and the group forced its way into Page’s store, causing over $400 worth of damages, most of which was liquor the women poured into the street.  Way and the other participants were arrested for malicious trespass but found not guilty.  Page filed a civil suit and collected $140 in damages from Way and her Army, which was collected by selling property confiscated from those defendants.

 

 

Indiana Historical Markers noting Way's accomplishments. They were destroyed somewhat ironically by an ice truck delivering to the nearby liquor store.

 

In 1860, when the Civil War began, Way served as a nurse on the battlefield and was awarded a pension.  Upon her return to Winchester in 1869, Way restarted the Indiana Women’s Rights Association.  Shortly thereafter, the organization affiliated itself with the American Suffrage Association and became the Indiana Women’s Suffrage Association.  Way’s early involvement in the women’s rights and suffrage movements earned her the moniker “the mother of ‘The Woman Suffrage Association’ in Indiana,” given to her by well-known suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.  Authors of the History of Women Suffrage, a series of books released from 1881 to 1922, wrote Way was “a calm, forcible, earnest speaker, and though quiet and reserved in manner, she is genial and warm in her affections.”

 

In 1873, Way earned her license to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church.  When the Methodist church later revoked the licenses of women pastors, Way returned to her Quaker faith.  She earned her license as a Quaker minister in 1885 and began preaching at the Winchester Friends Church.  Way moved to Kansas for a while, becoming the first president of the Kansas Woman’s Temperance Union, a group which employed some of the guerilla tactics used in Winchester.  One account of a temperance-related incident reported a “whiskey-soaked bum begged in pleading tones, ‘Miss Way, please let me have one more drink.’ Way responded ‘I would rather brain you with this axe, so you could die sober.’”  The man was said to have survived the encounter, subsequently drinking whiskey from the street gutter, where it had drained from the barrels destroyed by Way and other participants in the incident.

The only known picture of Amanda Way.

Sources include:

Amanda Way was Indiana’s hard-core anti-booze baroness

Way, Amanda M. (1828-1914)

“An Act of Tardy Justice”: The Story of Women’s Suffrage in Indiana

 

Lawyer by day, amateur historian by night. Casedo’s Historian in Residence has a passion for researching the people behind the cases, notable firsts, and any little tidbit of knowledge with a legal angle. In addition to her historical pursuits, Jessica Barnett also enjoys spending time with her husband, three children, three cats, dog, and toad.

 

Casedo is used by Academic Researchers and Students to bring together their research around a single topic in order to make sense of it. It's simple drag and drop interface makes teasing out the threads of meaning brainwork rather than and exercise in document management. Casedo is completely free to try for thirty days. If you want to find more tools and tricks for Academic Research, have a read of Academic Research - Tools and Tricks.


Take a digital detox

Digital Detox

Casedo is a tech company, and so more than most we can suffer from 'overtech' and find that we spend most of our time on screens, gadgets and other 'labour-saving' devices. Katie McKenna looks at how to manage this, and perhaps be a little more human again.

Nightmare! My Wi-Fi connection is down. I am happy to confirm that yes, I have turned it off and turned it back on again in true the IT guys style but alas, the problem is much bigger than my lack of IT knowhow. So, with mounting pressure to perform despite a global pandemic how can I use this time wisely? I am sure you have been in this situation before. Though the term 'digital detox' can stick in the craw, there are things that can be done offline of course but thinking outside of the box a little, here are a few ideas to keep you busy and productive.

 

Think about your why

Can you remember why you studied law in the first place? If you’re anything like me, you made that decision a rather long time ago. Have a think about what drives you? What about your job makes you happy? When you do you feel most in flow? To put it simply, why do you do what you do? Are you dedicated to making your clients lives easier? Are you fighting for justice? Are you righting wrongs? When you know your why and publicise it, it makes you more attractive to prospective clients, it provides a sense of authenticity to your practice and inspires your colleagues.

 

Thank you

Everyone has had a hard year but if you’ve been lucky enough to receive instructions, why not take the time to say a heartfelt thank you for the support you’ve been provided during a trying time? It might be hard to recall without access to your electronic files, but it does provide an opportunity to think about the year past, connect with what you achieved this year and which cases stand out. We should be spending more time on kindness in 2021.

 

Check in on someone

As much as we don’t acknowledge it, mental health was strained in the profession before the pandemic and sadly, things will only have proceeded to get worse given our new stressor and his friends. It might be worth taking the time to pick up the phone to call that colleague, referrer, contact, friend to check in, see how they’re doing and brighten up their day.

 

Write that article

If your firm has a website, chances are you’ve been hounded to write something at some point. It can seem daunting and cuts into your billable hours. Astound yourself at what an article can do for your reputation and personal brand awareness. I personally find the act of writing down my thoughts quite cathartic. Once you have an idea, you’ll be surprised how quickly an article can come together. What should I write about? I hear you cry. How about your thoughts on a recent case? How have you found working at home? Are you a fan of digital hearings? How do you make your Zoom meetings pop?

 

Clear desk(top), Clear mind

When time is sparse and pressure is high, good practice can sometimes disappear and every so often I’m sure that files have ended up in the wrong place or there is a rogue local copy on your computer desktop. This could be the time to clear a messy computer desktop that is overcrowded, ensure that the files are saved into correct folders or deleted before your IT team notice. Indeed, it might be that you are not using the right digital tools to begin with! It’s also a great time to use folders and subfolders to declutter your electronic workspace and your mind.

There is also the literal desktop; be it a proper desk in your home office or the kitchen table. It’s a great time to think about the space you work in, day in day out. Is it clear of distractions? What can you do to make it more pleasant? Is there anything you can add to inspire yourself when working? Taking the time to improve the environment we work in can have a great impact on your productivity going forward.

 

Revolutionise your mindset

Your brain is amazing, and it will never make you a liar. If you constantly live your life focusing on the negative (and let’s not lie there is a lot of negative out there right now!) it will constantly reinforce that view and all you will see are the problems that surround your life. The trick is, that you should make your beautiful mind work for you. Gratitude is my constant attitude. I start my day by listing all the things that I am grateful for in my life which makes me constantly look on the bright side and see the good.

I do have bad days, like everyone else, but I know that how I react and what I do next is constantly within my control. Don’t believe me? The Emmons and McCulloch study confirmed this very fact. I also know that I need to take a whole body approach to my mental health. I digital detox is not the whole story, and that a healthy diet is absolutely key to my well being.

 

UPDATED: 2022.11.09