High-Profile Simpson Defense Goes High-Tech : Computers: At CSUN seminar, ‘Dream Team’ lawyers discuss their reliance upon--and struggles with--sophisticated electronics.

Robert L. Shapiro, the man who assembled O.J. Simpson’s legal Dream Team, is a savvy enough guy. Yet when the case began a year ago, Shapiro now confesses, he was a “computer illiterate” who didn’t know his bits from his bytes.

Although the marathon trial has been lauded for setting a new high-tech standard in the criminal courts, Shapiro and colleague Robert Blasier say many of the participants even now are struggling with their computers and other gadgets--without complete success.

“You oftentimes will see O.J. or me or Bob conferring very seriously, looking down, talking very seriously like we’re doing something important. And it’s usually Bob saying, ‘How do I get rid of this dialogue box on my computer?’ ” Blasier said, only half-jokingly.

Shapiro added, “Prior to this case, I was a computer illiterate. So most of the time when people ask, ‘What are you doing in the courtroom?’ I am sitting there learning the different programs that Mr. Blasier has installed on my computer.”

During a two-hour seminar last week at Cal State Northridge on the use of computer technology in court, Blasier, the defense team’s forensic and computer expert, said virtually the entire murder case is on an NEC laptop computer he uses in court--merging the vast volumes of testimony with thousands of electronically scanned pages of exhibits and pictures along with a virtual law library.

On any given day, Blasier said, the defense team uses as many as 11 different software programs in court, including one that quickly prepares computer-generated slide shows involving evidence. Blasier said Simpson himself now “loves the computer.”

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Part of the computer setup is an indexed and readily searchable computer version of the trial’s transcript, allowing quick comparisons of current testimony by witnesses with their past statements.

“I think it’s been a tremendous advantage being able to find things in the transcript very quickly,” Blasier said. “We’ve had nine months of testimony. And it’s very difficult to remember from one day to the next what somebody said.”

He said of prosecutors, “I don’t think they have gone as far as we have. I know they haven’t because sometimes they come over and ask me to find something too.”

Blasier told the seminar, which drew about 130 students, that the defense offered the software to Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, but didn’t believe the judge has been using it.

Though the defense attorneys said they were far more computerized than their opposition, Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said prosecutors have access to similar information on their courtroom computers. “We do the same things with ours that they do with theirs,” Gibbons said.

Not that all the technology works that well: Blasier said a system called Trial Link, which displays and allows the visual manipulation of evidence, has been sparsely used. “The reason no one has used it except for me is everyone is terrified of it,” he said.

Shapiro told the workshop that Blasier helped rescue the defense team after an earlier six-month computerization effort--costing hundreds of thousands of dollars--proved an utter failure. “I turned to the computer expert, and asked him to pull up a subject, and we couldn’t get any data out,” Shapiro said.

“There are computers all over the place,” Blasier said. “[But] there are very few people in that courtroom who understand anything that’s going on with any of the computers.”

Attorneys, he said, are “notoriously kind of behind the times when it comes to computer technology.”

Blasier said even he has fallen victim, losing use of the laptop “for a whole week,” for instance, when he recently had problems installing the new Windows 95 operating software.

And not all of the attorneys are convinced computers are in their future. Blasier said that when his laptop was down and another computer had given out, fellow defense attorney Gerald F. Uelmen quipped, “You know, I dropped my legal pad on the floor the other day--and I just picked it up.”