The author’s stated purpose for this text is to address law students and practicing lawyers with little or no knowledge of computing systems or computer software. The text meets this objective in most cases. The author’s Irish background and education flavor the contents and cause the book to be more useful to students in the UK than in the US. Examples used to illustrate points are from both European and American situations.

Leith suffers from the same dilemma as most authors of introductory texts: How much information on a given topic should be included? In some areas, he spends more time than necessary citing several references to make his point where one would suffice, while in other areas, notably in the later chapters, he does not spend enough time discussing a topic. This situation is not uncommon; it occurs in many texts.

The writing style and spelling are British and will cause the American reader some minor discomfort. The only editing error of significance is the use of the word “Inland” instead of “Internal” when referring to the US Internal Revenue Service in Chapter 7.

Leith states that one of the major purposes of automation (computerization) of the legal profession is to handle the word processing and accounting tasks. Neither of these is discussed in any detail, however.

The reader will get the feeling that the author is a proponent of computerization of as many aspects of the legal profession as possible; the author does an excellent job of providing views on both sides of the issues. He includes historical background when making his arguments.

The two major legal information systems, LEXIS and WESTLAW, are covered in great detail. This discussion is the highlight of the text and makes it worth acquiring.

The text is divided into 10 chapters, presumably to coincide with the 10 lecture sessions in Leith’s computers and law course. Chapter 1 is an introduction to computer internal components, disk drives, and programming languages. Chapter 2 deals with how computers communicate and with network architecture. Viruses are also included in this chapter, but since the ARPAnet Morris case is the only virus discussed, the reader is led to believe that viruses are not prevalent and not much of a problem. Chapter 3 discusses a wide range of peripheral devices including the latest technology of optical storage. Chapter 4 provides the reader with a brief introduction to text handling and text processing. This area is expanded upon in chapters 5 and 6, where methods of retrieval of legal information are discussed in detail. This discussion includes LEXIS and WESTLAW. The famous Honeywell v. Sperry Rand and CDC v. IBM cases are also used as examples here. Chapter 7 presents a discussion of computerized court systems, including document preparation, jury selection, and payments control. The remaining chapters provide the reader with some insight into expert systems (MYCIN and others are used as examples), codification of knowledge, and artificial intelligence.

Overall, this text is in the middle of the pack of texts in the area. The references are extensive and current. I am not familiar with the British system of legal education, and this text may be well suited for a course in that system, but it lacks the exercises and assignments that normally appear in texts aimed at American universities.

Leith is well qualified as an author in this area. He is both a computer scientist and a lawyer. His dissertation concerned the uses of computerized legal systems by practicing lawyers in the UK. He is the author of several papers and texts dealing with computer science and legal issues.