The lawyer

Alan Ringwood is a partner and specialist litigator at Bell Gully. He has been practising law for 35 years.

Life before Google is hard to remember, but it definitely involved more field trips.

The world was out there, and all the information you needed, was stored in hard copy form.

This meant that there were trips to the university library, to check the definitions – in every single dictionary they held – for the word you needed to construe in a particular way.

There were whole days spent in the Law Society library, while it rained outside, trying to find any kind of obscure authority for some arcane point of law that you knew must have been judicially considered.

There were trips to the public library to look at microfiche records of historical newspaper articles.

Then there was the waiting for information. A DIFFERENT TIME: Three professionals reveal what their jobs were like before Google.

Ordering a book from another library, waiting a week, and hoping that it would be useful when it arrived.

This all meant that the process of giving legal advice had a very different rhythm, and clients seemed naturally to understand that.

Clients didn’t expect the advice the same day, or even necessarily that week.

Life before Google was a lot less convenient. But it certainly was not all bad.

The academic

Professor Deborah Levy is head of the property department at University of Auckland’s business school.

Research before Google revolved around going to the library – it was very manual and time-intensive.

She would look up a journal article, take notes by hand or photocopy it.

Floppy disks (remember those?) were used to transfer information between computers, with no such thing as email, flash drives or the Cloud.

But while Google and the digital age has made it easier to be an academic researcher, it has also made it more difficult.

It’s now not unusual to submit an article to a journal and have a reviewer come back with an obscure article that they’ve Googled and that the article hasn’t covered, and then the researcher has to explain why it’s not relevant.

The journalist

Tony Potter has been a journalist since 1955. He worked on London’s Fleet St, then the Auckland Star and several other Auckland newspapers.

In the old days, when computers had now forgotten names like L.C. Smith and Underwood, when newspapermen – it was mostly men – were expected to go out of the office and interview people called “contacts”, there were other avenues of information.

Newspapers had libraries, which were staffed by librarians (all women) and housed bound volumes of newspapers.

There was also the contact book, beloved of “old fart” reporters, usually written in code so other ambitious up-andcomers couldn’t filch information, with a list of people who knew things.

This article originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald and is published with permission.

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