A Lawyer’s System for Active Reading

By Craig Tashman

Reading is foundational to lawyers’ work. Whatever matter a lawyer is working on, the facts and the arguments are captured in prose. Reading is likewise how lawyers maintain and hone their craft, reading to keep abreast of changes in the law and “maintain the requisite knowledge and skill” in representing clients by continuing study and education (ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.1 and Comment 8). This type of reading goes beyond the passive reading of a magazine, newspaper or novel. It requires a richer and more robust interaction with text, known as active reading.

Active reading comprises many daily tasks lawyers engage in, including highlighting, annotating, note taking, comparing and searching texts. It demands more than flipping or turning pages. Lawyers need to create, find and compare a variety of annotations, margin notes and highlights, race among multiple sections of text and return to pinpoints in supporting documents on demand. Paper supports many active reading tasks, and with advances in hardware and software, computers are getting better at building an increasingly paper-like experience. But neither is the sine qua non of active reading.

I devoted my doctoral research and embarked on a career to develop a system tailored to the needs of active readers, especially attorneys. By studying the limitations of past systems, we created a fluidlike representation of text where lawyers can restructure, revisualize and rearrange primary and secondary sources, annotations and highlights to meet the demands of a client, project or study. This article details my journey: defining active reading processes and noting some requirements that support it, discussing how paper and current computer systems fall short of lawyers’ active reading requirements and outlining the features of an AR system for lawyers.

Active Reading

Active reading involves four core processes: annotation, content extraction, navigation and layout.

Annotation involves marking the original text with highlights, underlines and margin notes. This process requires a reader to look ahead and behind to highlight critical passages. Otherwise, you have an entire textbook in a rainbow of colors. It requires efficiency, which is lost when switching between tools for different annotation types. Annotations also need support for distinctive markings and mechanisms to retrieve prior annotations.

Content extraction involves copying or noting original content to a secondary surface, as when taking notes. Notably, lawyers must organize, review and link their extracted content to its source.

Navigation tools apply to moving between documents, such as when searching text, turning pages or flipping between document locations to compare text. Navigating multiple documents and converting between them require high efficiency.

Layout processes visually and spatially arrange content, such as cross-referencing, comparing content side by side or drawing a document overview. This arrangement requires support for viewing different content pieces in parallel while maintaining the document’s original linear, sequential structure.

While paper supports some AR tasks well, such as free-form annotation, marginalia and manipulating pages with both hands (bimanual), it lacks the flexibility for others.

Paper and Digital Paper Falls Short

Although paper’s tangibility and tactile nature support quick navigation, the linear nature of most paper texts is rigid, giving lawyers little flexibility to create navigational structures and limiting their ability to create their narrative.

With paper or books, it isn’t easy to view disparate parts of passages in parallel to compare them or synthesize material. Linking different texts can require another paper scheme of colored sticky notes or tearing pages out of context to compile a new reader—which is never a good idea.

Even annotation, a strong suit for books and papers, can fall short. Publishers may constrain margins to put more print on pages and may bind books in ways that make it difficult to operate in the margins. Even with ample margins, extensive annotations, or even simply annotations referring to multiple or disparate pages, are challenging, and references to different materials can get lost in the details.

Given the high level of interaction with text required by active reading, computers in the 20th century were not up to the task. The spatial arrangement of documents on small, low-resolution displays was limited, and digital solutions could not provide the same level of interaction afforded by paper. But advances in hardware and software have mitigated these shortcomings.

Today’s large, high-resolution computer displays provide a comfortable amount of room to view multiple, entire pages of documents, and software, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, offers numerous schemes to annotate and comment on documents. Modern laptops and tablets support virtual-ink annotation, bimanual interaction, gestures and touch-sensitive scrolling using the nondominant hand. These and other features put modern computers and tablets nearly on par with paper. But this returns us to how well paper supports active reading.

Although legal professionals often see paper as the gold standard for various document-related tasks, I contend that, in many cases, paper may be better than its digital counterpart but still not necessarily adequate for active reading. The spatial arrangement of paper and digital paper, whether on the surface of a table or computer display, and the collection of content within a document make it challenging to compare passages on different pages and in disparate documents.

For lawyers, the shortcomings of paper and digital paper can lead to inefficiency and incomplete research, causing them to miss or misrepresent critical sources. These errors or omissions can lead to inadequate knowledge of the facts or of the law to represent clients and, in the worst case, malpractice.

All this is not to say paper is terrible. After all, it has persisted as a medium to exchange information since it replaced parchment in the eighth century. But it and its digital counterparts that mimic the affordances of paper do not address all the opportunities for improvements that digital technology can potentially provide the legal profession. Lawyers need an active reading system that lets people organize information naturally and links sources and annotations in a workspace where connections won’t be missed.

Toward an Active Reading System for Lawyers

The core objective of my research was to reimagine document representation, surpass the capabilities of paper and meet the needs of lawyers’ active reading. My colleagues and I challenged fundamental assumptions about how humans interact with information to achieve this. We conducted studies, interviews and design workshops to explore the diverse context of active reading for lawyers and the challenges they encountered.

A lawyer’s active reading tool must defeat the spatial limits of paper and digital paper and allow a person to make the right connections between texts. The tool must document how to get from the facts of a case to primary and secondary sources and finally to legal conclusions. The tool must help lawyers connect new knowledge with existing information by linking notes and references and bringing critical information together to surface new insights.

Single-purpose reading and writing software, such as Word, Acrobat and other PDF readers, treats documents as static objects. The software is good at capturing information but does not address or record the thought process from facts to source documents to legal conclusions. In short, these options miss connections.

Modern note taking tools like Microsoft OneNote (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onenote/digital-note-taking-app), Roam (https://roamresearch.com) and Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) make recording, recalling, cross-referencing, citing and connecting notes and ideas accessible. Still, they cannot directly link source documents to new documents or to annotations in the same workspace, track the logical flow from recorded facts to legal analysis and pinpoint support for legal conclusions.

When lawyers read documents and research cases, they must compare and analyze text, make connections and reach conclusions. They must link findings to determine a litigation strategy or resolve a matter. Lawyers need a tool to store source documents in workspaces, annotate the facts, analyze the law, record connections between notes and texts and link new insights—all to form a compelling narrative to share with partners and judges.

An active reading system for lawyers must support extensive, flexible and direct control of the visual arrangement of content, including source material and annotations. It must also provide flexibility in navigating content and annotations with rich features that can link content together to capture important connections so that the context behind facts and the relationships between them are readily accessible. In designing such a system, we focused on features that would support all the significant aspects of active reading and homed in on reinforcing those processes where paper and paper-like representations fall short, especially on the interaction between source texts and annotations.

Our design resulted in LiquidText (https://liquidtext.net). This software allows lawyers to access existing texts in their original form and use a range of interactions, including gesture controls, to view multiple text regions and selectively create custom navigational structures among texts and annotations. But our journey to improve active reading practices and empower lawyers with transitive tools does not end here.

A fundamental principle of my research is an understanding that thinking and cognition emerge through interactions with texts and tools. Today I am exploring the implications of a deeper understanding of active reading aided by generative artificial intelligence and using templates to support legal workflows. As part of the emergent phenomena of cognition, I believe that these tools have the potential to expand the ways we can think and let each of us concentrate on those parts of cognition that are most distinctly human.

Craig S. Tashman, Ph.D., received his doctorate in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. His research focused on developing technologies and novel user interfaces to enable computers to go beyond the limits of paper and enhance the reading and document analysis process. This research led to the development of LiquidText, a reading, note-taking, and document analysis platform that has won the coveted Editor’s Choice from both Apple and Microsoft’s app stores. He holds patents in 3D imaging, data compression, and interaction design. He can be reached at craig@liquidtext.net.