A few weeks ago, I wandered the three floors of the New York Legaltech exhibits areas looking at the goods and services offered by the vendors who specialize in products geared toward lawyers. The January Legaltech conference and exhibits are in their 19th year and about three years ago, a smaller version was added in September.

Having examined the exhibit area nearly every year, it is interesting to note the trends in legal software and technology. The most obvious change is the size of the exhibit area itself. In the early years, this was limited to a single floor. This year, the January show stretched over three floors and was teeming with vendor booths.

In the mid-1980s, there were an equal number of hardware and software vendors. Companies like IBM, NBI, Syntrex and Compaq were targeting the legal market with word processing on personal computers, local area networks and dedicated word processors. By then, some of the still-popular legal time-keeping and billing vendors had begun to show their wares at this major legal technology conference. Many of the popular programs shown then are long gone (although I suspect there still are some lawyers hanging onto them instead of upgrading).

Products like Wordstar, Multimate and Samna competed with upstart WordPerfect. Although Microsoft had a version of Word, it neither attended this conference nor aimed its product or features toward lawyers. On the billing side, Timeslips, Tabs and Juris already were competing for market share. Case management options were limited to home-grown solutions using programs like dBase, Q&A and DataPerfect. CompuServe was the major player for electronic mail and began sponsoring forums to allow lawyers to ask and answer each other’s technology questions as well as vendor-run forums to get access to technical support. MS-DOS was in its heyday, running on Intel 286, 386 and 486 computers with monochrome monitors.

By 1990, the Information Age was in high gear and the Legaltech conference reflected that. Most firms had bought their first personal computers complete with WordPerfect 5.1. Microsoft had begun selling early versions of Windows and Word, but these weren’t attracting the attention of most lawyers. WordPerfect and IBM were lured into spending significant development dollars in porting their main products to OS/2 while Microsoft, which had been a partner with IBM in developing OS/2, quietly shifted gears to ready its Windows platform and products.

The transition to the commercial use of the Internet and a whole new way of working was about to begin. Due to the changing demographics of the legal profession (the average age of a lawyer nationally has been dropping since the early 1980s), fewer lawyers were maintaining the opinion that "lawyers shouldn’t be anywhere near computers." This is what I was told by the partners where I worked as a young associate many years ago and was a major reason for my subsequent career change.

The past 10 years have seen a dramatic change in the tools and options available to lawyers for handling client work. The most obvious are the changeover from DOS to Windows and the role of the Internet to law and to virtually every endeavor. Many law firms have made painful transitions from DOS to Windows and from WordPerfect to Word. Many firms expect their lawyers to be able to perform some computer tasks themselves (although they don’t provide them with nearly as much training as they should or as they do for support staff). In the mid 1980s, the rule of thumb was that a state-of-the-art computer would last about five years. Today, if you’ve shopped well, you’re lucky to get two to three years of useful life from the average computer. Similarly, software versions change almost daily — well, not quite, but it feels like it!

After several major hardware transitions (from 486 to 586 to Pentium then I, II and III with ever-increasing hard drive and RAM memory) and a significant number of software upgrades, I go back and forth between WordPerfect 8 and 9 and Word 2000, depending on my client’s needs. I still use Timeslips for time and billing. We converted from version 8 to 10.1 last fall to better-support my clients who were purchasing the newer versions.

For firms still using version 8, though, I still recommend staying with it — unless there’s a reason to upgrade due to newer hardware and operating systems like Windows 2000 that will not run with older programs or a need to submit electronic bills to insurance carriers using the ABA task-based litigation codes or a need for some of the newer features such as split-fee billing and unlimited capacity for slips, clients and codes. My marketing database and client note-taking systems created in Symantec’s Q&A and Lotus’ Agenda have been consolidated into a single case management program, Time Matters from Datatxt, that handles those functions as well as myriad others crucial to running my business.

One of the dramatic improvements to my office and many of my clients has been the relatively recent maturing of several case management programs. These finally deliver on the original Microsoft promise that Windows would allow for seamless sharing of information among programs from different vendors. While many of these programs have DOS origins going back more than 10 years, the recent versions have met with market success due to their improved functionality and integration with key legal software programs, such as the main legal time-keeping and billing programs.

Early laptop computers were barely portable and were limited in what they could do. I am writing this column on a 4-pound Dell Latitude laptop that has more memory and storage space than many desktop computers. The screen and keyboard are perfectly acceptable for working many hours at a stretch.

While I initially viewed it as another gadget I didn’t need or want to carry around, I find my Palm Pilot (I use the Palm Vx) has become an essential accessory to allow me to work better and easier. Almost immediately, I could eliminate my phone book and Rolodex cards as well as week-at-a-glance calendar. By synchronizing it with Time Matters, I can change contact information while outside the office, make new appointments and be confident that literally at a push of a button, my calendar and contact lists in Time Matters on my office network will be updated as well. Appointments or changes made by my staff while I am away from the office are sent to the Palm at the same time.

The application that really made my Palm pay for itself was the addition of Iambic’s Time Reporter for Timeslips. This palm-based application lets me use my Timeslips client and activity codes and record my billable time and expenses onto my Palm. Again, when I press the button on the Palm’s cradle, the slips I have created are sent directly into my Timeslips database and are ready to be billed. In the past two years, most of the other major billing programs have begun offering equivalent programs for Palm-based units that connect to the programs.

The biggest change in technology in the past few years has been the growth of the Internet. A mere five years ago, many of my clients did not have access to e-mail in their office and few were experienced doing research and locating information using a web browser like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Now, only a handful are using dial-up connections, most already have or plan to get high-speed access connections and many use web resources regularly for legal work.

For the past year, the focus of many of the vendors at Legaltech has been to demonstrate their web-related products and services. The main thrust of this development has been toward application service providers (ASPs), which offer off-site storage of programs and a firm’s data. Instead of maintaining a file server on which someone in the firm has to install software and maintenance releases and perform backups, you use your Internet connection to access the ASP’s server to run programs and work with your data. The concept, while interesting, seems to be a bad match for attorneys.

Lawyers, as a group — and I include myself even though I don’t practice — tend to be control freaks. We often fail to delegate tasks and end up wasting time on functions that could be done more efficiently and cost-effectively by others in our firms. The idea that we would somehow trust an outside company to host our applications and data, particularly when we’re required by ethical canons to protect our clients’ privacy, seems to be an unlikely scenario that will be slow to be accepted, if ever.

Several prominent legal software vendors have begun to rework the ASP design with the idea of allowing firms to host their own data and access it over the Internet when away from their office. This model holds more promise as the tools needed to set up and maintain your own web server become easier and cheaper. Keep an eye on these types of options as they’ll provide you with more bang for the buck while keeping control over your data.

Even though it took a number of years before most firms purchased computers for staff and about a decade before significant numbers of lawyers began to have them on their own desks, other technologies, however, such as fax machines, photocopiers and cell phones, were much more quickly accepted. Even today, there are law firms continuing to rely on WordPerfect 5.1 and their macros rather than upgrading.

Voice recognition or the ability to convert spoken words to text has been around for more than a decade, too. In the past few years, the quality of microphones has improved so that recognition has become more reliable. The availability of hand-held units that can be used with voice recognition software on your computer is one of the major steps in making this a more practical solution for many lawyers doing their own document preparation. Ironically, this increased acceptance comes just after two of the three major competitors merged and the resulting company is sinking under the weight of its debt.

The pace of technology has increased dramatically. In less than 20 years, laptops have gone from 20-pound luggables to fully functioning 3½ pounders. Infra-red technology allows people to move their mouse and keyboard further from the base unit of their computer, print without wires or "beam" information from one Palm Pilot to another. Combined with cell phone technology, the wireless world is guaranteed to provide much of our information in the next few years. I can easily see, when the prices come down and components are made in the right size and shape with the functions I need, purchasing a combination Palm-based cell phone.

Many years ago, when speaking to groups of lawyers about what the future of technology might hold and how it would change the practice of law, I imagined my ideal portable device. My dream design was a small unit the size of a cigarette pack that would be a hard drive with all my critical data. I could carry it and plug it into kiosks that had monitors, keyboards and printers, and work wherever I went. We already are coming close to that dream, although today it requires several different tools. However, it’s easy to imagine them melding over the next few years to give me the portability I need. Of course, the piece I was missing in my dream system was the Internet.

Ironically, as I was putting the finishing touches on this column, I picked up the Circuit section of The New York Times. There were three pertinent articles on the front page. The lead story, "The Web, Without Wires, Wherever," documents the upcoming installation of public and private access points to allow computer users who have a wireless card to access the Internet through a wireless network with the high speeds of cable and DSL services. The early sites will include most airports and commercial establishments like Starbucks.

Another article, "Legal Guidance, Lawyer Optional," also in many ways focuses on profound changes taking place that will impact every practicing lawyer. This article described how more business owners and consumers of legal services visit sites like LegalVantage.com to do research, discuss issues with lawyers and access forms.

The third article previewed IBM’s new laptop computer, "A Laptop Design Thinks Outside the Clamshell." The story describes a new design that will appeal especially to lawyers. The ThinkPad TransNote case looks like "an imitation leather portfolio." When open, the left side is the screen and the right side is a paper pad. The screen is designed so that if you only want to read information on it, you can do so, but if you need a keyboard, you can pivot the screen and the keyboard is below. Additionally, if you’re in a meeting and need others to see the screen, you can pivot it toward them. The pad also can serve as a source for entering data when used with the Ink Manager Pro software.

Maybe those ASP models aren’t really as far off the mark as I initially thought. If I can access my critical information over the Internet on a small portable device I carry in my purse, maybe my dream is about to come true.