We’ve been hearing about this “paperless office” thing for decades now. Take a look at this BusinessWeek article from 1975. Here’s an excerpt:

Some believe that the paperless office is not that far off. Vincent E. Giuliano of Arthur D. Little, Inc., figures that the use of paper in business for records and correspondence should be declining by 1980, “and by 1990, most record-handling will be electronic.”

Of course, it’s easy to poke fun at predictions that don’t quite hit the mark, but… Well, it’s been more than 35 years since this article came out, and we’re still waiting for our paperless offices, along with our jet packs and robot housemaids.

Why do our offices and cubicles still resemble mausoleums for dead trees? The copier and computer printer came along, of course – but so did tree-friendly technologies like the scanner, the office network, email and the Internet.

For a more complete answer, consider this familiar scenario: You’re rummaging through a case file, and you pull out an important document that you hadn’t noticed before. You make a copy and return the original to the Bankers Box you found it in. As you read your copy, you mark it up with your trusty highlighter and scrawl notes in the margins. Then you ask the secretary to make three more copies of your annotated version to place in various case folders and share with your team.

What just happened? In order to analyze and collaborate with your colleagues, you’ve turned one document into five – because aside from getting everyone together in a conference room, there’s no other way to do it.

Or is there? In fact, a new generation of online collaboration tools is changing the way legal teams work together, which is especially good news if you’re a tree. One example is West Case Notebook, which provides a central repository for sharing all of your case files, along with annotations and other information added by your team. Just think: Even though the paperless office may still be years away, your case files could be 99% pulp-free today.

The scenario above was adapted from this West Case Notebook Case Study, which tells the story of how Grodsky & Olecki, a small firm in Santa Monica, improved efficiency while reducing reliance on paper. You can see additional case studies, customer testimonials, videos and more at west.thomson.com/casenotebook.

Walk into any law office in the country and you’ll soon spot one lurking in the shadows of a desk, or loitering in some out-of-the-way corner of the room. And they’re often not alone – Bankers Boxes and their brethren frequently form gangs, arranging themselves into teetering stacks that can strike fear into anyone who approaches.

Given how familiar Bankers Boxes are in the legal world, their moniker might seem a bit odd – until you hear their story.

The story goes back to 1917, when the Bankers Box Company was formed after a chance elevator meeting between two entrepreneurs. One of the men, Walter Nickel, made cardboard boxes and sold them to banks for record storage. Nickel had just been called up to serve in World War I and was looking for someone to buy his business.

The other man in the elevator, Harry Fellowes, was intrigued by Nickel’s enterprise. The 16th Amendment (the one that legalized the income tax) had taken effect a few years earlier, and Fellowes knew that the tax would soon be expanded to pay for the war effort. If more people were snared by the income tax, he reasoned, more boxes would be needed to store all those tax records.

By the time the elevator doors opened, Fellowes had struck a deal to purchase Nickel’s box-making business for $50, or about $830 in today’s coin. The company went on to diversify into all kinds of office products, and in 1983 the Bankers Box Company changed its name to Fellowes Manufacturing.

As sturdy and economical as Bankers Boxes are, they’ve also come to symbolize some of the most tedious work performed by legal professionals: Pulling file folders from a box, one by one, and sifting through hundreds of documents in search of that key piece of information that could cinch up a case.

Bankers Boxes will always be useful for document storage, but their days as case-file organizers are coming to an end, thanks to electronic case management tools like West Case Notebook. And as anyone who’s ever hauled a 25-pound file box into a courtroom can attest, that’s a good thing.

West Case Notebook makes it easy for legal teams to organize and collaborate on case files electronically. Find out how Forman & Cardonsky, a small firm in Elizabeth, New Jersey, freed its attorneys from the file box ball-and-chain in this West Case Notebook Case Study. And you can see other case studies, customer testimonials, videos and more at west.thomson.com/casenotebook.

Of all the tools used in law offices every day, none is taken for granted more than the highlighting marker.

Imagine a marked-up legal document in a world without highlighters. What do you see? Pages layered with hand-drawn lines, circles, boxes, brackets and squiggles?

Fortunately, that horrifying, ink-smeared alternate universe was averted with the invention of the highlighter in 1963. Avery came up with the original Hi-Liter, and they wowed us again in 1978 by mixing phosphors into the ink to create those “glowing” colors. The first fluorescent shade was yellow, and it’s still the most common highlighter color used today.

As cool as neon highlighters are, they may be going the way of carbon paper and correction fluid, since legal documents are increasingly printed only in final form – or never printed at all. But the practice of highlighting text may live on forever; digital highlighting is one of the most popular features in Word, WordPerfect, and now West Case Notebook, which lets you highlight information in electronic case files.

West Case Notebook makes it easy for legal teams to organize and collaborate on case files electronically – multi-color highlighting included. Find out how the Baltimore law firm Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann uses these features to save time and money in this West Case Notebook Case Study. And you can see other case studies, customer testimonials, videos and more at west.thomson.com/casenotebook.

“A lawyer one day spoke to him with his hands in his pockets. ‘Is it not a curious sight to see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets?’ remarked the humorist in his quiet drawl.”

That humorist, of course, was Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, who died 100 years ago today at the age of 74. Best known for his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn books, Twain was a sharp-witted societal commentator, and his wit was sometimes aimed in the direction of attorneys and the court.

Here are just a few of his many comments on our country’s laws and legal system.

• “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”
• “We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding 12 men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.”
• “The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury.”
• “We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain.”
• “If there wasn’t a penalty for laughing in court, the jury would never be able to hear the evidence.”
• “If you laid all of our laws end to end, there would be no end.”
• “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.”

If you’re a fan of legal fiction, be sure to check out one of Twain’s lesser-known masterpieces, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, a book with a murder trial that turns on fingerprint evidence (and was published years before fingerprints were first used as evidence in court).

For more great quips from Mark Twain like the ones above, pick up a copy of Uncle Anthony’s Unabridged Analogies: Quotes & Proverbs for Lawyers and Lecturers. It’s available right now at a 10% discount to Westlaw Insiders like you.

The wisest of men can fool himself. – Jewish saying

If the mark of a good prank is the number of intelligent people it can fool, then these three semi-famous April Fools jokes involving lawyers and lawmakers clearly made the grade.

Senate Bill Bans Web Surfing While Intoxicated

Back in 1994, an op-ed piece in the April issue of PC Computing magazine ridiculed an imagined Senate bill that would prohibit “drunk driving” on the “Information Highway.”

“The moniker – Information Highway – itself seems to be responsible for SB #040194,” the magazine reported. “Introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy, it’s designed to prohibit anyone from using a public computer network (Information Highway) while the computer user is intoxicated. I know how silly this sounds, but Congress apparently thinks that being drunk on a highway is bad no matter what kind of highway it is. The bill is expected to pass this month.”

The article’s author, John Dvorak, later said that the spoof caught  the attention of the Washington Post – and a few U.S. senators (including Ted Kennedy, one of the purported sponsors of the bill), who received a flurry of angry phone calls in response to the article.

Sadly, the original article can’t be found on the Internet, but you can read the text here, attached to a letter about the article from a Kennedy staff member. (Scroll down to see the article text.)

Alabama Legislature Changes the Value of Pi

In another April Fools hoax involving lawmakers run amok, a bogus AP news article reported that the Alabama legislature passed a bill that redefined pi from its previously assumed value – “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate” – rounding it down to an even 3.

According to the story, the bill’s sponsor had “called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer could harm students’ self-esteem.”

The fake news report was published in the April 1998 edition of an obscure newsletter by New Mexicans for Science and Reason (you can read it here), but it soon was circulating all over the world, thanks to a relatively new phenomenon: mass email forwarding.

Colorado Supremes Issue Dress Code for Attorneys

The Denver Bar Association showed its humorous side with an April 2001 newsletter article about an unusual Colorado Supreme Court decision that compelled the state’s attorneys to wear uniforms in court.

And not just any old uniforms. “Based on the recommendations of fashion consultants and parochial school principals, the Court will now require all lawyers, female and male, to wear a blue blazer with the Colorado State Seal on the pocket,” the article said. “Men will wear tan slacks in summer and gray flannel in winter. Women barristers must wear plaid skirts year round. Women are also expected to wear white bobby sox, and men are prohibited from donning any shoes with tassels.”

The Court reportedly acted out of concern over casual attire in the state’s courtrooms. “Confusion grew as each law firm established a different dress code, with names such as ‘business casual,’ ‘corporate casual,’ ‘up casual,’ ‘dot.com casual’ and ‘downscale but still lawyerly casual,’” the article explained.

Apparently, the spoof was believable enough for several fashion-conscious attorneys to call the bar association for clarification. (The original article lives on at the Denver Bar Association website – and it’s still a fun read.)

The Jewish saying at the top of this post can be found in Uncle Anthony’s Unabridged Analogies: Quotes & Proverbs for Lawyers and Lecturers, which is available at a 10% discount to Westlaw Insider readers. (And that’s no joke!)

It seems that a law degree may improve your odds of being elected president, since 26 of our 44 presidents have also been lawyers. Here’s the complete list of lawyer-presidents:

1. John Adams
2. Thomas Jefferson
3. James Madison
4. James Monroe
5. John Quincy Adams
6. Andrew Jackson
7. Martin Van Buren
8. John Tyler
9. James Polk
10. Millard Fillmore
11. Franklin Pierce
12. James Buchanan
13. Abraham Lincoln
14. Rutherford Hayes
15. Chester Arthur
16. Grover Cleveland
17. Benjamin Harrison
18. William McKinley
19. William Howard Taft
20. Woodrow Wilson
21. Calvin Coolidge
22. Franklin Roosevelt
23. Richard Nixon
24. Gerald Ford
25. Bill Clinton
26. Barack Obama

If you like presidential trivia, try these expert-level bonus questions. The answers are at the bottom of this post.

1. Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1991. (Yep, that’s him above, on campus.)
   Who was the only president besides Obama to earn a law degree from Harvard?
2. Who was the last president without a college degree?
3. Why is Obama considered to be the 44^th president, when he’s only the 43^rd person to serve in that office?

Thanks to everyone who played during our second week of What’s Next Trivia – and congratulations to Abby W., an assistant librarian at a law firm in Minneapolis, who answered our trivia question and won the drawing for a $30 Starbucks gift card! We look forward to seeing Abby and our other Twin Cities friends at next week’s preview breakfast in Minneapolis. In the meantime, keep playing What’s Next Trivia with Johnny & Jenny Westlaw – and we’ll keep handing out those Starbucks gift cards.

How to enter and win

• Watch  the Johnny & Jenny videos from the third week of the tour (Miami, Atlanta and Tampa).
• Go to any of this week’s videos (from Houston, Denver or Dallas) and click on the PARTICIPATE tab on the bottom of the video screen.
• Answer a single trivia question about one of the videos. Then type in your name and email address (so we can contact you if you win) and click Submit. That’s it!

One winner will be chosen at random from the entries we receive each week, so keep following and playing along as Johnny & Jenny visit the remaining cities on the tour! (For more information, see the official rules.)

Answers to Bonus Questions

1. Rutherford Hayes graduated from Harvard Law School – way back in 1845.
2. Harry Truman never earned a college sheepskin, although he did study law at the University of Missouri in Kansas City for a couple of years.
3. Grover Cleveland served non-consecutive terms, so he is counted as the 22^nd and the 24^th presidents.