Dale C. Doerhoff
Cook, Vetter, Doerhoff & Landwehr
Jefferson City

Mowing our lawn took several hours with the old reel push mower when I was a boy. When my dad bought the new "Lawn Boy" power mower, we thought it was a labor-saving device. But it wasn't. For some reason, my father took down the yard fence and expanded the yard. We kept mowing a larger and larger area until the time it took to mow was about the same as before.

Now, I have a lawn tractor with a big mower deck that can mow more acreage in the time it used to take to mow the small yard with the reel mower (or the medium-sized yard with the Lawn Boy). But I'm not saving time, because my yard has expanded with the capacity of my machine. Many of my friends and neighbors have done the same. Nationwide, lawns now occupy more than 25 million acres – enough turf to blanket all of Pennsylvania. We are growing more sod than any other single crop, including wheat and corn.

Over the last three decades, the same phenomenon has taken place in our law offices. When I entered the profession in 1971, secretaries typed documents manually and made copies with carbon paper, the equivalent of the old reel push mower. The technology dictated clarity and brevity. With revisions a matter of secretarial favor, our documents seldom exceeded five pages.

Then came the first "labor-saving" device – the "Xerox" copy machine and Lawn Boy of its day. But just as yards grew after power mowers arrived, so did documents after copy machines. Where five pages or less was thought to be enough before, 10 or 20 pages were now required. Secretaries, now freed of the burden of making carbon copies, had more time to type.

Then came personal computers with word-processing software, the big-decked riding mowers of the law office lawn. What happened? The same as before, only worse. Documents grew exponentially. Our law firm rode along with the trend. With a few keystrokes, we could, and did, churn out trusts, contracts, and other documents that began to look more like congressional reports than the sparse, focused legal documents of old. Our peers were doing the same, or worse. One of our local firm's "simple" trust form grew to more than 60 pages.

My epiphany came three years ago. My client, a pathologist with 25 years of education, was reading a fat, living trust indenture I had prepared for him. As I watched his eyes glaze over, it dawned on me that the problem was mine, not his. So I asked him, "Do you understand any of that?" "Not really," he said sheepishly.

That was the turning point. I asked him to hand the document back to me, and I invited him to return in a week for a fresh start. My partners and I used the time to rewrite our forms, making them simpler, shorter documents, written in plain language. We sucked in our collective breaths and pruned away pages of "boiler plate" that had accumulated over the years. What we thought was a safety blanket was needlessly choking our clients.

Facing the Lawn Boy conundrum is not easy. What is it about human nature that causes us to use a labor-saving device as a work-expanding tool? How can we welcome technological advances into our lives without also opening the door to the detrimental effects? Cellular phones may have liberated us from the stationary telephones on our desks, but do we have to take business calls on our cell phones, anytime, anywhere, even while we are on personal or family time? Faxes made transmission of documents instantaneous, but does it necessarily follow that lawyers are obliged to give opinions on faxed documents in less time than it takes to boil an egg? And how are we coping with the Internet? Its benefits are still emerging, but the downside is as plain as the spam on my screen. Is there a way to use the information highway for legal business without sharing the increasingly crowded road with the likes of South American Viagra dealers and Nigerian bank-fraud schemers? And how do we avoid being so inundated by information and so "wired" to electronic devices that we fail to properly fulfill the lawyer's important role of counselor at law?

Should the profession be more aggressive in addressing these and other technology-related issues right now, or should individual lawyers and firms be left to cope as best they can, in the hope that somebody, someday will figure out how to take the good without including the bad? But if we continue to muddle along, relying on the unseen hand to shape our destiny, will we unthinkingly overburden ourselves with unnecessary busy work and end up with the equivalent of mindlessly mowing 25 million acres of grass every week?