The Determination and Result departments at first were thought to be of primary importance.  Corresponding as they did in their functions to the former exclusively judicial qualities of the courts and the final judgments thereof, the exaggerated import previously given to those functions pre-supposed an equal necessity in this subdivision of the management of the corporation.  This proved to be incorrect.  It was found that after a careful framing and narrowing of the matter in dispute by the Issues department, and a thorough and careful sifting of facts by the Expert and Investigation departments, the dispute gradually, if not wholly, disappeared.  Men of the highest character and calibre being employed at large salaries as heads of these departments, have given adequate satisfaction, as has been proved by the prosperity of the Corporations.  The recompense of the heads of these various departments, requiring as it does men of the greatest commercial understanding, is said to be in some instances fabulous.

In the early quarter of the present century and indeed in the latter part of the nineteenth, the undercurrents of many movements were already stirring the surface of the placid stream in which for so many centuries had been flowing the course of justice.  Those curious relics of a medieval, age, the law courts, still at so recent a date, retained many of the forms, characteristics, and usages of a time when knights fought in plate armor and indulged in the mimicry of battle, urged on by the glamor of chivalry.  The very terms and the legal phraseology of the period implied the jousts, tournaments, and ordeal by battle of a romantic and self-deceptive age.

The universal world war that resulted in such an immense change of social and economic values contributed naturally to the destruction and abandonment of old forms and structures.  Yet even before the war and the economic revolution that followed so quickly thereafter, the tendencies toward a more sane treatment of the question had already begun.

Like the extinct class of so-called physicians and doctors, who have now been amalgamated by the Public and Private Health Corporations, what was known as the legal profession or men known as lawyers and judges, had been gradually losing their characteristics as a class and had been step by step merging into men of business.

One of the earliest changes was the disappearance of the lawyers known as the real estate lawyer.  Up to about 1890 there still remained members of the legal profession who made a livelihood out of the examination of the titles to real property.  The obvious advantages of a comprehensive title examination plant by large corporations known as Title Insurance companies soon eliminated this particular subdivision.