> That would require you to have a PACER account, which costs money beyond $15.00 per quarter in fake-page access at $0.10 per fake-page
Patent law is federal law, and nearly all the relevant federal opinions are available for free online. I do think it is problematic, in principle, that very small corporations cannot represent themselves pro-se. That said, pro-se litigants are an enormous burden on courts because they have no idea what they're doing. A federal judge will have hundreds of cases on her plate at any given time. They need litigants to get in, make their case, and get out.
> But what does lawyering really involve? Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word templates, turning Word files into PDFs, attesting to obvious things ("I have caused this envelope to be placed in the mail as of this date") and occasionally reading a similar case to cite.
My mom thinks that programming just involves "typing things into the computer." What you're describing is paralegals' work if not secretarial work. Most of lawyer's work involves researching case law, writing memos and briefs, doing factual investigation, interviewing witnesses, taking depositions, etc. Clients are sophisticated. They're not paying $500/hour lawyers to turn Word documents into PDF's, not when you can get droves of bar-admitted lawyers to work for $20/hour on Craigslist.
> Because the courts won't let computers into the picture.
Invent a computer program that can apply the law to the specific facts of a case and generate a helpful brief and we'll talk. In reality, many college and law-school educated people of well above average intelligence can't write a helpful brief.
The legal industry has been adopting computer technology as it becomes available. A good example is document review. Computers excel at searching through large amounts of information looking for potentially-relevant documents, so law firms increasingly use computers to flag such documents (though many/most clients still prefer to have this outsourced to low-cost contract attorneys). Most work that used to be done by secretaries is automated. Document management systems produce blacklines, track changes is used to enter revisions, etc. Again, clients are sophisticated. They're not paying $500/hour for a lawyer to manually enter hand-markups.