The Evolution of Legal Mobile Devices

As we’ve previously mentioned, our editor Jim Dedman is now contributing one monthly post to the North Carolina Law Blog. Last week, his most recent submission was published at that site. The topic: “The Evolution of Legal Mobile Devices.” You see, our editor likes to think back wistfully to even those most recent days of yore – so recent in fact that they are mostly not of the yore variety.  Nevertheless, there has been a very quick evolution in the device(s) lawyers use to communicate.  So quickly has technology changed that now, in 2012, we can accomplish with a single device those things that took two, three, or even four devices just five or six years ago.  When you think about how that has changed the way we work, and the way we travel, it’s kind of astonishing, isn’t it?

On that note, here’s how Jim began his post:

I have been practicing law for ten years now, but I remain reluctant to offer tales of how the profession used to be.  Ten years is not an eternity. Besides, there are lawyers out there who have been practicing thrice as long as I have, or more.  But when I first began to practice, way back in those halcyon days of 2002, lawyers were just beginning to use both the Internet, mobile devices, and such regularly in their daily routines.  So too were lawyers then integrating modern cellular telephones into their practice (although, of course, there were those early adopters with car phones and those terribly inefficient and wonderfully obsolete bag phones).

Recently, I spoke with a younger lawyer about mobile devices, and whether that young lawyer should purchase the new iPhone 5, an Android, or what have you, even an iPad or laptop.  I couldn’t help but laugh, because it reminded me of a fateful trip that I took, circa 2005.

…

Today’s young lawyers of today will never know that hassle.  And the lawyers of my generation will never know how frustrating it must have been to carry around all those reams of paper required when traveling in those fateful days of yore before mobile devices and laptops.  Yikes.

You can read the rest of the piece here.