TV lawyers like Mason, Hawkins and Preston routinely best prosecutors and private attorneys alike by dint of imaginative research and brilliant courtroom tactics. Without the aid of the TV scriptwriters, though, a lone practitioner or a small firm is rarely a match for a large adversary backed by a platoon of associates in the firm and a big reference library. Nor can small outfits usually afford the high annual fees electronics firms charge for use of computers that can search their prodigious memories in seconds and spew out legal precedents.
One way for the small firm to have a fighting chance, at reasonable rates, is to turn to a research company manned by lawyers. There is now a handful of these in the U.S. doing legal spadework.
The largest and most aggressive is The Research Group Inc., with offices in Cambridge, Mass., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Charlottesville, Va.—all cities with major university law libraries. The Group gears its services to smaller firms, which constitute an important market; about three-quarters of the private attorneys in the U.S. work in offices that have three lawyers or fewer.
The company will prepare basic analyses of statutes and precedents in question, draw up briefs, develop strategy or seek grounds for appeal. It claims to be competent in most legal specialties, from admiralty law to zoning. Relying solely on old-fashioned search and analysis, not computers, the Group charges its customers $17.50 an hour—a bargain compared with the average $40 that individual lawyers routinely charge for their own time. The difference can mean substantial savings for the client.
The staff that churns out this cut-rate research consists of 50 lawyers, most of them under 30, and some 150 third-year law students who work part-time.
The founder and chief is Walter W. Morrison, 29, who began organizing his enterprise in 1969 while still attending the University of Virginia Law School. During the summer he served as a clerk in a 15-man Hartford firm and occasionally came into contact with lawyers from smaller firms. "Their hours," he observed, "are eaten up by running an office and gathering the facts on a case."
All too often, he found, they were so ill prepared in court that they could not argue their cases competently. He concluded that "true legal advocacy, the bedrock of our system, is crumbling."
Strengthening the bedrock has turned out to be profitable work for Morrison, who began with a $150,000 loan and is now grossing $2 million a year.
The Group currently has some 8,000 lawyer-customers and is wooing more with an advertising campaign in legal trade journals. Because the company does not deal directly with the public, professional codes against a lawyer's advertising his services do not apply. Morrison even dreams of opening branches overseas; he already has a few clients on Guam, in Canada and Guatemala.