rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn) (04/27/88)
The California courts recently abandoned an experimental effort to use digital scanners and optical disk technology for storing and retrieving legal documents. The primary problem was the unwillingness of witnesses to swear to the accuracy of documents presented to them on a screen. Under oath, with lots of money and perhaps criminal liability at stake, witnesses were faced with deciding whether that screen image really matched the documents they worked with a few years ago. Had a line been missed? Were there any portions illegible that should not have been? Witnesses were not sure, and generally refused to swear that the documents were accurate. When presented with a paper copy, they could read it, hold it, and were confident in testifying that it was indeed the same document. A secondary problem was that the lawyers were not sure what to expect, so they always had plenty of paper versions on hand in case something went wrong. Between these two effects, the court found that the digitized documents were useless. I have not seen the system that was used, but from what I have seen of other document scanning systems, I expect that the reproduction quality was excellent. The key difficulty is witness uncertainty. Consider how would you react if you faced huge fines and bankruptcy if you made a mistake in assessing whether a scanned picture really matched a document that you worked on several years ago. Rob Horn