The history of legal work isn't a history of better arguments. Lawyers have been good at arguing since Cicero. It's a history of better access to the record, the slow, unglamorous fight to know what's actually in front of you before you have to stand up and say something about it. Every real leap in the practice of law follows the same pattern. Someone looks at a pile of paper that has become physically unmanageable, and instead of hiring more people to read it, they change how it's organized. Let's go back to 1873, when a man with a stack of gummed labels quietly rebuilt American legal research.