Consulting the Computer

Like most lawyers, John Horty hates the drudgery of legal research. Several years ago, while preparing a manual on laws governing hospitals in all 50 states, he and six other lawyers had to peruse more than 26,000 law tomes. The job took almost three years, and Horty recalls: "I got damn sick, sore and tired of indexes." By the time he was through, Horty was convinced that only the computer could rescue his profession from such dreary tasks.

Horty, 41, now directs one of the most ambitious efforts yet undertaken to computerize the nation's laws. During the past three years, the company that Horty organized--Aspen Systems Corp. of Pittsburgh--has fed into its memory banks the statutes of all 50 states, the U.S. Code and 14 volumes of U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Key Phrases. The service should prove invaluable to legislators who would need an army of researchers to dig up all the statutes and Supreme Court decisions that would be helpful in drafting new bills. And they may miss a few. Already, 31 states from New Hampshire to Hawaii have contracts with Aspen.

A customer can ask for the law on any topic, such as gun-control, and the machines will deliver the full text for every statute containing that phrase. Depending on the scope of the request, Aspen's computers take about eight hours for a 50-state search, which may cost between $1,000 and $4,000. Some examples of how the data bank has been used so far:

P: When Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense, his office hired Aspen to scour the U.S. Code for every mention of his title. McNamara wanted to know about all his statutory duties, no matter how obscure.

P: Iowa's Governor Robert Ray asked Aspen to hunt for every statute in his state that requires him to make an appointment to high office before a given date. Ray had almost neglected to fill one position before the deadline, and he did not want that to happen again.

P: A national food corporation wanted to attach nipples for baby bottles outside the package of a product as a sales device. When Aspen found that this would violate health laws in several states, the company abandoned the plan.

Horty knows the limitations of his service. For example, Aspen has put on computer tape the decisions of only one state's top court--Pennsylvania. Still, having easy access to all the relevant statutes will enable legislative aides to look up case law far more quickly than they could before. Moreover, Horty maintains that the time saved on researching statutes will free lawyers for their "primary function" of legal analysis.

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