Doing econometrics at BYU in my master’s program, I wrote computer programs in COBOL and Fortran and ran them on an old IBM 360. You know, this is the real reel-to-reel computers that you see in the old movie War Games, a room full of reel-to-reel computers. I would reserve time because I was doing these economic regressions, the sorts of things that you do in econometrics.

When I got into the practice of law, we were using dictaphones that had magnetic belts that were about four inches wide. I was told that I had to dictate my work because, well, we use correcting selectrics and they had secretaries who typed, not lawyers. So I was disciplined to learn to use my dictaphone, which I still use because it’s more efficient for me to dictate than to keyboard.

Most lawyers today keyboard their own stuff, and I have a reason why that’s a bad idea. After a few years, they came out with computers as typewriters. So they had the screen. I had this background in computers, so I went to a couple of guys who were computer geniuses and I said I want a program that I can use to display documents in the courtroom.

They said, “What?” And so I described what I wanted, and they wrote that program for me, and I used that in the courtroom. It blew the other side away. It made millionaires of these two guys because they saw this idea and what a great idea it was. So they have improved and improved and improved that program, and what I use today is a descendant of that first very program I had them write for me in about 1981–82, something like that, when computers as we know them were in their infancy.

Then we got PCs, and they continued to develop. I began doing DOS coding on my computer at the office. Now they’ve gotten even more sophisticated. We got Windows, and I write many programs that interface between WordPerfect, my word processing program rather than Microsoft Word, because I can write programs for WordPerfect and I can’t for Microsoft, and I can make WordPerfect interface with my presentation program.

So that I’m sitting here at my desk, when I do something in the WordPerfect document here, it displays in the trial presentation. It makes it very, very efficient. I got into it because I was involved in computers as an econometrician until my wife talked me how to be an economist and into being a lawyer. So is it an easy transition for me, and I don’t write the programs now. I’ve done a lot of major beta testing in these programs, and I think anything that you do that is repetitive you can do with the computer.

Let me give an example. One of the toughest things that happens right before trial, and that makes other lawyers fret, is they suddenly have to designate their trial exhibits, a final trial exhibit list. And they’ll have their secretary, or someone, sometimes it’s a baby lawyer even, type up—keyboard, it’s not typing anymore, it’s keyboarding—the trial exhibit list.

Well, I wrote a program that I use with WordPerfect, and I don’t know if you can see it here, but on my sheets here, because trolley zip number, let me show you how easily I do that. I’m reading the documents, and I know this is important, and so right here, if you can see my screen, I decide that’s a good trial exhibit. I do, bam, just like that, and it puts that script in there, just like that.

Then I tell my paralegal, “Well, we need the trial exhibit list.” I’ve written a program that goes through this chronology, picks every one of those out, puts them in order, gives them numbers and the description, and it’s done. I can do a trial exhibit list of 100 or more documents in about 30 minutes, and it’s flawless. It works. I give it to the clerk, and it doesn’t take two or three days.

So computers make you more efficient as a lawyer, and I say if you’re not using the computer, then you’re committing malpractice.