The Man in Court

by Frederic DeWitt Wells

In the year 1947 it seems almost unbelievable that the universal use by the public of Judicial Corporations should have been a matter of such recent economic growth. It is interesting to trace their development and the social causes from which they sprang.

The efficient administration of these co-operative Corporations being demonstrated by their financial success, makes it unnecessary to dwell upon the details of their intensely developed organization. Existing as they do upon so broad a comprehension of the whole commercial and social structures, it is little wonder that they have proven their value to the community. Their highly specialized departments of Issues, Investigation, Statutory Law, Records, Determination and Results correspond in a measure to the former method of procedure in the extinct courts of law and equity. Times have indeed changed.

The analogy between the present methods and the antiquated and conventionalized customs of those cumbersome and inadequate institutions is not difficult to find. The department of Issues, for example, corresponds to what was known as the pleadings in an action. These were formerly bits of paper governed as to form by inflexible rules, instead of the efficient method by which under the trained managers of able minds the matters in dispute, either of fact or law, are now narrowed down to exact points of difference. Naturally the methods of their managers being untrammelled by outside rules and they being men of wide experience and tact, the work of this department is not as difficult as at the first commencement of Judicial Corporations was anticipated.

The departments of Investigation and Experts correspond with the former division of court trials known as evidence and testimony. Any explanation would be futile of this branch of a forgotten formalism. The ancient rules of evidence and court procedure could only be understood by contemporaries and an extensive research has failed to disclose very clear concepts even by them. The modern methods of the departments governing the ascertainment of facts, either through the experience of the departmental employees or the efficient work of trained investigators, have naturally been much aided by the invention of the Viviphone making all communication adequate and easy.

The departments of Statutory Law and Records even yet retain certain characteristics of a period when judicial officers and clerks represented to the public mind the embodiment of what was known as "Red Tape," a true colloquialism descriptive of the attitude of official conservatism. These departments being governed according to the latest bibliographical methods are of merely supplemental value as reference. The Simplification and National Unification of Federal and State statutes has, of course, added greatly to the facility of this branch of the business.

The Determination and Result departments at first were thought to be of primary importance. Corresponding as they did in their functions to the former exclusively judicial qualities of the courts and the final judgments thereof, the exaggerated import previously given to those functions pre-supposed an equal necessity in this subdivision of the management of the corporation. This proved to be incorrect. It was found that after a careful framing and narrowing of the matter in dispute by the Issues department, and a thorough and careful sifting of facts by the Expert and Investigation departments, the dispute gradually, if not wholly, disappeared. Men of the highest character and calibre being employed at large salaries as heads of these departments, have given adequate satisfaction, as has been proved by the prosperity of the Corporations. The recompense of the heads of these various departments, requiring as it does men of the greatest commercial understanding, is said to be in some instances fabulous.

In the early quarter of the present century and indeed in the latter part of the nineteenth, the undercurrents of many movements were already stirring the surface of the placid stream in which for so many centuries had been flowing the course of justice. Those curious relics of a medieval, age, the law courts, still at so recent a date, retained many of the forms, characteristics, and usages of a time when knights fought in plate armor and indulged in the mimicry of battle, urged on by the glamor of chivalry. The very terms and the legal phraseology of the period implied the jousts, tournaments, and ordeal by battle of a romantic and self-deceptive age.

The universal world war that resulted in such an immense change of social and economic values contributed naturally to the destruction and abandonment of old forms and structures. Yet even before the war and the economic revolution that followed so quickly thereafter, the tendencies toward a more sane treatment of the question had already begun.

Like the extinct class of so-called physicians and doctors, who have now been amalgamated by the Public and Private Health Corporations, what was known as the legal profession or men known as lawyers and judges, had been gradually losing their characteristics as a class and had been step by step merging into men of business.

One of the earliest changes was the disappearance of the lawyers known as the real estate lawyer. Up to about 1890 there still remained members of the legal profession who made a livelihood out of the examination of the titles to real property. The obvious advantages of a comprehensive title examination plant by large corporations known as Title Insurance companies soon eliminated this particular subdivision.