Legal Records Scenario
Author(s):
Michael C. Loui
At Dewey, Cheatham & Howe (DCH), the fourth largest law firm in Chicago, managing partner Robin D'Cradle wants to increase the productivity of the secretarial staff. Robin believes that many of the staff spend too little of their time typing legal documents and too much time sending frivolous e-mail messages. Robin hires Dana Torrez, an information systems consultant, to enhance the firm's computer systems to monitor the keystroke rates of the secretaries and to record their e-mail messages for later review by supervisors.
Dana is grateful for the contract, a satisfying recognition for the excellent reputation of Dana's small but growing consulting business, Urbana Information Consultants (UIC). If all goes well, Dana can look forward to a long relationship with DCH. Dana has some nagging doubts about the wisdom of using keystroke rates to measure productivity, and is concerned that the e-mail messages might include embarrassing personal correspondence. Nevertheless, Dana accepts Robin's argument; that managers have a duty to monitor productivity, and that because DCH owns the computing equipment, all e-mail messages belong to DCH. Reasoning that it would be impractical to record every keystroke and to store every message, Dana decides that a statistical approach should suffice. Dana asks J.C. Jackson, a distinguished professor of statistics at the University of Illinois, for advice. After studying the situation, J.C. recommends a complicated adaptive randomized sampling method to collect the data, and a sophisticated resampling strategy to infer the keystroke rates.
At UIC, Dana's associate Kelly Kim is a recent computer engineering graduate from Illinois. Kelly doesn't understand J.C.'s algorithms completely, but is confident about implementing them correctly. Anyway, thinks Kelly, J.C. is fully responsible for the results of the statistical calculations. Kelly wants to implement a state-of-the-art distributed client-server system, to learn about this new technology. Kelly is convinced that from a technical point of view, the best network server for the system is the amazingly fast IPM AS/460, augmented with several terabytes of disk storage. Kelly is thoroughly familiar with the capabilities of the IPM AS/460 because Kelly's domestic partner is the product manager for the IPM AS/460 at Illinois Programmable Machines. In fact, because Robin seems willing to invest a lot of money in the project, Kelly surmises that DCH could afford two network servers, for much higher reliability.
Among the small group of people at DCH assigned by Robin to work with Dana's firm is Leslie Long, the chief accountant. Robin has trusted Leslie for many years. Leslie's motto is, "Good decisions require good data." Nearing retirement, and with many responsibilities at DCH, Leslie has been unable to keep up with modern auditing techniques. Leslie is uncomfortable with the statistical audit proposed by J.C.: Leslie suspects that because secretaries' workloads vary dramatically from one day to the next, a sampling approach may not produce sufficiently reliable data. Leslie may offer only a qualified opinion on the system. Also in the DCH delegation is Merle Matsunaga, a paralegal assistant. Merle insists that only the secretarial staff be monitored electronically. In Merle's judgment, the professional staff, including the paralegals, handle particularly sensitive information from clients. Thus, their e-mail messages should not be stored centrally, where the messages could be read by any secretary's supervisor. Because no one in the DCH delegation is on the secretarial staff, Dana decides to find out more about the secretaries' workloads by talking with a friend, Noel Nielsen. Noel works part time as a secretary at DCH, while studying for an bachelor's degree in occupational health. None of the secretarial staff had been informed about the electronic monitoring project previously, but Noel eagerly tells Dana about the stressful work environment at DCH. Although the salaries are high and the computing equipment is excellent, there is tremendous pressure on the secretaries to type legal documents rapidly and accurately. Some of the staff complain that their hands feel numb in the middle of the night.
Questions:
- What are the factual, conceptual, and ethical issues in this case?
- How should Robin, Dana, J.C., Kelly, Leslie, Merle, and Noel work together to solve the ethical problems?
Michael C. Loui
October 1997