Technology was late to come to the world of lawyers and law firms, long known for quill pens and steno pads. But now that it has arrived, it is spreading briskly.

"Within the past five years, technology in law firms has really, really advanced," said Randi Mayes, executive director of the International Legal Technology Association, an Austin, Texas, group that represents 1,700 US law firms and legal departments.

A primary driver of this evolution is the need for law firms to keep pace with the technology used by their corporate clients.

The explosion of electronic discovery has also forced law firms to become more tech-savvy.

And new federal statutes that require extensive financial reporting and electronic record-keeping, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, have forced the rapid adoption of technology in the legal profession.

Technology has become critical to most industries, of course. But the legal profession resisted the age of technology much longer than many others.

"When I became a lawyer in 1990, the legal profession was a paper-and-pen business, and almost everything was done by typewriter and forms," said Alan Klevan, a Wellesley lawyer who chairs the Massachusetts Bar Association's law practice management section, which helps law firms use technology to enhance the practice of law.

Last month, the association hosted a legal technology expo in Needham that attracted several dozen technology firms that pitched their products to lawyers.

Now, however, the management of cases can be so complicated and time-consuming that technological assistance is critical. Software programs used by law firms handle receipts, billings, expenses, negotiating leases and insurance, personnel issues, time keeping, word processing, cost recovery, conflict checking, marketing, scanning, docketing, and data storage. Special tax-reporting software exists for trusts and estates departments, and financial software aids bankruptcy groups.

During electronic discovery, countless documents, files, phone records, and electronic correspondence are mined in civil litigation. Software can be used to comb through e-mail systems and identify key information, sparing lawyers or legal assistants the task of reading through hundreds or even thousands of e-mails in search of important data.

"Before, we'd get boxes of paper, and paralegals would go box by box by box, coding and figuring out what was important on each page," said Henry Chace, chief information officer at the Boston law firm Burns & Levinson, whose 125 lawyers collectively use about 70 software applications. "Now we just scan those documents and use algorithms to determine what's important or not."

As law firms increasingly become global operations, their multiple offices worldwide must also have time-and-billing software that works with multiple currencies.

At large firms, conflict checking, to ensure that the firm does not represent a client whose interests clash with the interests of another potential client, is also done electronically.

"If you're opening a matter in San Francisco, you have to find out if you have any conflicts with the Tokyo, New York, Singapore, and London offices, and you can't start billing till you know," said Chace, a former president of the International Legal Technology Association. Without software that runs such checks, the process would be unmanageable, he said.

Litigators tend to be at the cutting edge of technological advances because they rely on high-tech software to manage their cases and impress juries during trials.

But other types of lawyers remain well behind the curve. Many real estate lawyers, for example, still make in-person visits to courthouses and registries of deeds to file paper documents.

But that, too, is changing.

"Real estate lawyers used to have to trudge to the registry with a check and documents in hand," said Paul Roth, regional sales director for Simplifile, a system that enables real estate documents to be filed electronically. "Now they just have to sign on [to a computer] and send them in."

Simplifile sells its product in 20 states, but in Massachusetts the only registries of deeds that allow electronic filing so far are in Lowell, Springfield, and Plymouth, Roth said.

Despite these technological advances, "I still drag a lot of solo practitioners kicking and screaming into the technological age," Roth said.

"Most of them say they're fine the way they are, and they really want to leave it to the next generation to change."

The majority opinion in the 5-2 ruling, written by Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer, said the Ohio law revised did not violate the constitutional rights of injured parties to trial by jury, to a remedy for their injuries or to due process and equal protection.

"The decision in this case affirms the General Assembly's efforts over the last several decades to enact meaningful tort reforms," Moyer wrote.

In one of its challenged provisions, the law caps awards at $250,000 or three times the amount of economic damages, whichever is greater, up to an absolute limit of $350,000. The exception is when a plaintiff suffers permanent disability or loss of a limb or bodily organ system.

In another, the law prohibits awards for punitive damages exceeding two times the amount of the compensatory damages awarded the same defendant.

The court threw out a similar law in 1999 in a decision that prompted businesses to criticize Democratic justices who voted against the legislation. Since then, the court has become an all-Republican bench. In the 1999 vote, two Republicans joined the court's two Democrats in striking down the law, which was revised in 2004.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation had joined in urging the court to uphold the law.

Groups urging the court to overturn it included the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers, the Ohio Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The groups had been ordered in a 2004 civil case to pay 156 million dollars to the family of 17-year-old David Boim, killed in 1996 in an attack. A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the groups' role was not fully established.

It ordered a new trial to examine more closely the links between the organizations and the boy's death.

"The Boims will have to demonstrate an adequate causal link between the death of David Boim and the actions" of the groups, the court ruling said.

"This will require evidence that the conduct of each defendant, be it direct involvement with or support of Hamas's terrorist activities or indirect support of Hamas or its affiliates, helped bring about the terrorist attack that ended David Boim's life."

The groups had been charged with taking part in terrorism by aiding or financing Hamas, a powerful Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories.

"The Boims' theory ... was that in promoting, raising money for, and otherwise working on behalf of Hamas, these defendants had helped to fund, train, and arm the terrorists who had killed their son," the ruling said.

The defendants included the American Muslim Society and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which was the biggest Muslim charity in the United States until it was outlawed after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The foundation also faces separate criminal charges for alleged links with Hamas. It is charged with giving 36 million dollars to committees controlled by the movement from 1992 to 2001.

A leading US Muslim rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), welcomed the appeal court's decision Friday.

"This landmark ruling is a strong rejection of the recent disturbing trend of political lawsuits against American Muslims who have committed no crime other than providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians," it said in a statement.

"CAIR deplores the murder of David Boim and hopes that the actual wrong-doers are brought to justice."

In what will almost certainly be his final year as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox is preparing to tackle a number of issues — some controversial and some fairly straightforward — in 2008. Cox described an agenda he plans to discuss with senior SEC staffers after the new year. Though he has not announced that 2008 will be his final year at the SEC, it is almost certain that by the time President Bush leaves office in January 2009, Cox will also be gone, if only to allow the next president to appoint his or her own candidate to the position.

Among the goals Cox hopes to achieve in 2008:

•Mutual fund prospectus reform.

Noting that U.S. investors have invested about $3 trillion of their retirement funds in the stock market, and that half of that sum is invested via mutual funds, Cox says he wants the mutual industry to do a better job communicating basic information to investors about their offerings.

In November, the SEC put a proposal for mutual fund prospectus reform out for comment. In a few months, after reviewing the comments, the SEC will vote on the matter. "It's not that people need things dumbed down," Cox says. "But people are busy. There's a reason that CEOs insist on having executive summaries. It's important to put the vital information upfront."

•New rules on 12b-1 mutual fund fees.

These add-on fees were approved by the SEC in 1980 as a way for mutual funds to promote themselves, attract new investors and, theoretically, reduce the cost of operating a mutual fund. But with the explosive growth of mutual funds over the past 25 years, the fees have morphed into pools that fund managers can use to reward brokers they do business with.

The SEC's department of investment management is considering a proposal that would clarify the role that independent directors should play in approving a fund's 12b-1 plan. "You can expect the SEC to engage in rulemaking on 12b-1," Cox says. "Independent directors have been urging us to make changes in this area, and I think we can bring a great deal of clarity that is currently lacking."

•Proxy access.

Cox promises to revisit a topic that has generated the most severe criticism he has endured since being sworn in as SEC chair more than two years ago: the ability of shareholders to have access to a public company's proxy materials.

Last month, Cox voted in favor of a proposal that solidified the SEC's long-standing position that public firms can rebuff shareholders' attempts to get their own director candidates on proxy ballots. Citing ambiguity in the SEC's position, a federal appeals court ruled in 2006 that shareholder activists could force their candidates onto proxy slates through litigation.

Cox's vote to close the "ambiguity" loophole drew outrage from investor-rights advocates. But Cox said at the time of the vote that he was not willing to proceed with a meaningful overhaul of the commission's proxy-access rules with a commission hobbled by the absence of one Democratic appointee.

The August departure of Roel Campos, one of the Democratic appointees to the commission, changed the dynamics surrounding proxy access and scuttled any chance at meaningful reform for 2007. The other democratic commissioner, Annette Nazareth, also plans to step down.

If and when the Senate votes to confirm their likely replacements — Democrats Luis Aguilar and Elise Walter — Cox vows to revisit the issue.

•Protection of seniors.

Cox has made protecting older investors a priority, cracking down on abusive "free lunch" promotions and the like. For 2008, he wants to reach out to investor advisers to find out answers to potentially tricky questions.

If, for example, an investment broker has a longtime client who develops Alzheimer's, how should financial decisions be handled?

Cox realizes that every situation will have a unique set of facts and circumstances, but with a boomer population rapidly moving toward retirement age, he says he wants to develop some "best practices" in the area.

The case in U.S. District Court in Detroit stems from an accounting scandal at Delphi that led to the company restating financial results going back several years in June 2005, the law firms said. Deloitte was Delphi's outside auditor.

The plaintiffs, who were seeking to represent investors who bought Delphi securities from March 7, 2000 to March 3, 2005, sued Delphi, some company officials, Deloitte and certain other entities, the law firms said.

Most of the defendants, including Delphi, have already agreed to settle the case, said Stuart Grant, lawyer for one of the law firms representing plaintiffs in the case.

The value of the settlement with Delphi is about $204 million, with plaintiffs expecting to be paid in the company's common stock and warrants once it emerges from bankruptcy, Grant said.

Delphi, formerly a unit of General Motors Corp, filed for bankruptcy in October 2005 and plans to emerge from Chapter 11 in the first quarter of 2008.

Besides Grant's law firm Grant & Eisenhofer, other firms representing the plaintiffs are Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann; Schiffrin Barroway Topaz & Kessler; and Nix, Patterson & Roach.

The settlement agreements need to be approved by U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen, the law firms said.