Technology, Legal Practice and New

Max Travers

The invention of affordable personal computing in the late 1960s, along with new communication technologies, has made a huge impact on economic and social life. Many commentators describe this as a third industrial revolution that is creating an information society. One can get a sense of the scale of the changes, and how we take the new technology for granted, by considering that word processors and fax machines were only introduced into law firms, along with other organizations, during the 1980s. Before then, letters and documents were prepared using electric or manual typewriters and took a day or longer to deliver by first-class mail; technical information, such as law reports, legal forms, and statutes were obtained from consulting books and visiting law libraries. Many believe that recent productivity gains are only the first stage in a continuing revolution. High volume fields, such as land title conveyancing, wills, commercial transactions, and ...

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