I have been a practicing lawyer for 42 years, during which time I had a front-row seat to the complete transformation of my profession with the onset of advanced telecommunications technology. For those luddites among us who have been dragged kicking and screaming into the technological age, the change has been quite profound.

When I started to practice in Manhattan in the early 80s, the only means of "instant" communication was the telephone; we had no other way to communicate instantaneously, and certainly not in writing. We did not even have fax machines. If we needed to communicate immediately in writing with an adversary or the courts, we had our communications hand-delivered by private messenger.