During your time at the Above the Law Non-Event, you may have attended a Non-Eventcast panel, or checked out our Legal Tech-to-English Dictionary, or explored a tech upgrade with the industry’s top buyers guides.
Now, we’re pleased to present the Non-Event’s newest offering: The Museum of Obsolete Legal Tech!
Here, we’ll be profiling devices of years and centuries past, while bringing you up to speed on their present-day counterparts.
Read on for the first installment, where we detail how you may have utilized the Arithmometer as a 19th century practitioner. The tool is a forerunner of today’s Artificial Intelligence and Time, Billing & Payments applications.
Enjoy the tour!
The Case
It’s the year 1854. You’re a lawyer, sure, but have a rudimentary education, and math’s not part of it!
That’s a big problem, because your prospector client has just struck gold. He stumbled on a mine worth millions of dollars, and everyone wants a piece: investors, the government, labor, and various love interests old and new alike.
Your job: figure out who gets how much. Get the digits right, you’re rich. Get them wrong, you’re toast.
The Solve
Wikimedia Commons
Your tech-savvy paralegal presents an Arithmometer — a new-fangled calculating device.
Humans had already been using adding machines for centuries. The abacus first arose in Mesopotamia in 2700 BC; Blaise Pascal created that mechanical calculator with clock-like dials in 1642. But the Arithmometer is a whole new ballgame — it has sliding mechanisms and rotating cylinders that can add, subtract, and multiply! Wow!
Your paralegal tells you a French insurance mogul named Charles Xavier Thomas invented it in 1820 but was too busy making his own money to commercialize it until 1852. (Must be nice to be so rich.)
Now governments, lawyers, and other businesses are adopting it like mad because it’s the first calculator reliable and sturdy enough to be moved from office to office, town to town, without breaking. And that’s how it ended up here: California circa the Gold Rush.
Anyway, with a little help from your paralegal, and a whole lotta double-double checking, you have the breakdown of who gets how much gold from your client’s new mine.
Huzzah! Rich, rich — you’re all going to be rich! Oh. Wait. That’s fool’s gold. Well, fiddlesticks!
The Twist
Between 1851 and 1915, over 5,000 Arithmometers were produced.
Then the American inventor James L. Dalton had created a new push-button model that usurped the Arithmometer’s role as No. 1 number-cruncher. Dalton’s invention of course was replaced by electronic calculators mid-century.
Those in turn were overtaken by graph calculators that eventually fell to smartphones — just as SkyNet intended.
Today’s Tech
With today’s Time, Billing & Payments technology, tracking every minute of your professional life requires virtually zero minutes of effort. And legal AI software also holds the promise of streamlining mundane tasks, dramatically bolstering research capabilities, and much more.
Head back to the Non-Event for the tech that will help you steer clear of 21st century pyrite.
