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o  Transcript summaries: Users can enter summaries of pages of transcript,
   and search over those summaries.
   
o  Transcript searches: Transcript can be searched for using a transcript
   page number or a range of dates. Once a range of pages of transcript have
   been selected it is possible to conduct word searches, but it is only
   possible to use two search terms connected by AND or OR.
   
As this last comment indicates, LIS does not use free text retrieval based on
a concordance. Over a limited number of pages it appears to search transcript
with impressive speed, but the system needs to be tested when it is under a
heavier load and over more substantial transcript than we were able to
observe. The effectiveness of LIS does not depend upon free text retrieval,
but rather depends on extreme consistency in the transcript which is input, so
as to provide a wide range of automatic retrieval features, and on extensive
user-provided indexing or 'linking' of witnesses, exhibits, events etc and
summaries. It is a relational database approach to litigation support such as
is popular in the United States for document control systems (see Chapter 5).


TITAN and its used in the Western Australian Judicial Support System


TITAN is used by a number of Western Australian courts and agencies for
transcript retrieval. The Supreme Court's Judicial Support System will allow
all judges to use TITAN for retrieval of transcript, and is being used in the
Rothwells trial before Seaman J, as described in Chapter 3. The Royal
Commission into the Commercial Activities of Government and Other Matters,
which is investigating some matters which overlap those under investigation by
the Rothwells Task force, uses TITAN to retrieve transcript of its own
hearings and of trials arising from various Rothwells-related prosecutions,
the McCusker Report, witness statements, WA Hansards from 1987-90, and
document summaries received from the Rothwells Task Force (which were created
for TITAN). However, their own document summaries are retrieved using Indepol.
The WA DPP's Rothwells Task Force is using TITAN to retrieve from fourteen
sets of transcript concerning Rothwells' related matters, and also for
databases of statements. It is also used for its document control database.
Outside Western Australia, TITAN's main penetration into the legal market is
that it is used by a number of firms of solicitors in various States.

TITAN's retrieval features were described briefly in Chapter 3. The TITAN
application developed for the Western Australian Supreme Court has a similar
range of features to the LIS features listed above under the headings
'Exhibits', 'Litigation topics and events', 'Transcript summaries' and
'Transcript searches' except listing of exhibits by the witness tendering the
exhibit. TITAN's transcript searching is not required to be limited over a
range of transcript pages.


Programs used by lawyers in the United States


We have no information on the programs used for transcript retrieval by
prosecutors and courts in the USA. However, in relation to large firms of
lawyers, the 1991 Chicago-Kent College of Law Large Firm Survey (Staudt and
Keane (1992) Appendix B) of computing use by 127 major law firms shows that
Discovery ZX (37 firms) led, followed by Summation (27), ZyIndex (24),
BRS/Search (20) and INMAGIC (13). The contrast with the programs popular with
prosecutors and courts in Australia could hardly be more dramatic.


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