Lexpert Magazine

LEXPERT MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2016 63 BY GEORGE TAKACH TECHNOLOGY IT systems are taking over many legal research functions. Here's how to avoid being replaced by a robot Data-driven Legal: Part II ALLOW ME TO begin with a personal story. In the late 1980s, a few years aer I was called to the Bar, I remember being asked by a US client for something that required an order from the Ontario Secu- rities Commission. When I spoke to my securities law colleague, he called in an articling student, explained the situation, and asked the student to find three recent precedent orders from the regulator that generally matched our circumstances. He told the student these orders were published by the commission, but it would proably take him a day and a half to rum- mage through all the recent OSC bulletins and other materials to find appropriate ones, given that all of these orders were only available in paper. He pointed the student to our library, where these materials could be found in various stacks and piles. Before the student got to work, my colleague made it clear to him that finding the right OSC precedent orders (like finding a needle in a haystack) was a rite of passage for every budding securities lawyer. Aer the student le, I stayed with the securities lawyer to plan the next steps for the matter. About 15 minutes later, as I was about to leave, the student returned. My securities law colleague was somewhat an- noyed, thinking that his instructions were very clear and that supplementary ques- tions from the student were not a good sign — it meant the student didn't grasp what was going on. Instead, to my surprise – and to the se- curities lawyer's utter astonishment – the student handed him the three required precedents. e senior lawyer looked at the decisions. He slowly shuffled each decision to the top of the pile, and then looked up at the student. He was, quite literally, speech- less. Finally, he quietly uttered five words: "How did you do this?" e student, who it turns out was a te- chie, beamed a wide smile: "No problem at all, the OSC decisions just recently were put on an electronic database system. You can keyword search for them now. Do you need anything else?" he asked cheerfully. My colleague did not (could not?) an- swer; his eyes looked down, back at the orders in his hands that had been found in a ridiculously short amount of time. For him, it was one of those moments when your world shis, and you realize things will never be the same again. ACCOUNTING MAGIC, TOO is episode also reminds me of a deal I did a couple of years earlier. I was helping a company sell itself. It had some 300- odd shareholders. e CFO of the com- pany had created a large chart (composed of several sheets of paper taped together) that contained a handwritten list of all the shareholders, and then about 10 columns, one showing the gross proceeds of purchase price to be received by each seller, the next showing their deduction for the liability es- crow, another column showing withhold- ing tax, and so on. All figures had been en- tered in pencil, so changes could be made by an eraser. As we were discussing the informa- tion on this sheet, a young member of the investment bank advising the CFO came into the room, and indicated that the per-share price had changed, but only slightly. Not a problem, the CFO replied, as he began to erase the pencil entries on his chart. To which activity the young banker replied, "You know, you don't have to do that anymore, not if you have one of these," and he led us to his office down the hall, where he had an early version of an electronic spreadsheet open on his brand new personal computer. e CFO (nor I) had ever seen one of these spreadsheets before. e CFO (and I) marvelled at it. en came the conjuring part. "You see," said the juvenile banker, "you simply change one cell," and he did so, to the new per-share number, "and all the other figures change, automatically". I thought this was very cool. I glanced over at the CFO. He was, like my afore- mentioned colleague, speechless. And his eyes, I kid you not, were welling up. Ev- erything that he had done laboriously by hand over the many years of his long career (with changes requiring his trusty eraser) could now be done in a fraction of the time and effort with the push of a button on a newfangled electronic data-processing ma- chine. What magic indeed! MORE, NOT FEWER, LAWYERS What I'm trying to illustrate with these stories is that the IT revolution has already affected a number of processes that sup- port what lawyers and accountants do. But IT has not replaced lawyers — far from it. PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK | COLUMNS |

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