What amazes us is we have a photo of him in the library, he was obviously too junior to dump it all on the long suffering library staff.
BELIEVE it or not, the world existed before Google unlocked the key to everything we needed to know — and plenty more we didn’t.
As it has just turned 20, the internet’s biggest search engine, used for more than a trillion searches worldwide a year, has changed the world of its users — among them millions doing jobs where Google has become a vital tool.
But answers have not always been just a few taps away.
THE LAWYER
Alan Ringwood is a partner and specialist litigator at Bell Gully. He has been practising law 35 years.
Life before Google is hard to remember, but it definitely involved more field trips.
The world was not at your fingertips. The world was out there, in the actual world, and all the information you needed was stored in hard copy form.
Bell Gully partner Alan Ringwood, spent a lot of time in the firm’s law library in the mid-1980s, before the arrival of Google.
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 very 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 somehow, somewhere, sometime.
There were trips to the public library to look at microfiche records of historical newspaper articles to do with something or other.
And — if that could be imagined — there were even more exciting trips.
There was one afternoon at a particular bar in Auckland which had more than 100 beers where the lawyer checked all the labels for any that contained a depiction of a lion, for a passing off dispute.
There were also trips to bottle stores across the city to check the labels on bottles of whisky for similar reasons.
These sorts of field trips are still sometimes necessary (or we can convince ourselves that they are) but pre-Google there was simply no alternative.
Then there was the waiting for information.
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.
In particular, clients didn’t expect the advice the same day, or even necessarily that week.
So you not only had more time to research it, you also had more time to think about it, and you could put it aside to do something else in the meantime if you liked, and come back to it after reflection, and when it was done you posted it, and you might not get asked to clarify it for another week or two.
Life before Google was a lot less convenient. But it certainly was not all bad.
