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."

“There is no question,” said Gerald H. Silk, of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, that the subprime market has led to an increase in litigation. His New York firm has class actions pending against the subprime lenders Fremont General, Accredited Home Lenders and American Home Mortgage Investment.

Stuart M. Grant of Grant & Eisenhofer, a firm in Wilmington, Del., said, “All you are seeing now is the low-hanging fruit.” His firm has a shareholders’ derivative lawsuit pending against Countrywide Financial, the mortgage giant.

Class-action filings, excluding subprime cases and those stemming from the backdating of stock options, have increased almost 40 percent from 2006. Average settlements have also jumped, to $33.2 million from $22.7 million.

Another federal court has ruled against the auto industry in its attempt to block regulation of greenhouse gas pollution from cars.

The ruling today from U.S. District Judge Anthony Ishii in California supports a September decision by a federal judge in Vermont.

Both courts upheld the rights of states to use the federal Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gases from cars.

Steven Hinchman is a lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation, which intervened in the Vermont case.

Hinchman points out that both the California and Vermont cases followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision in April that affirmed the government's power to regulate global warming pollution.

This is strike three for the automakers. They've now lost in this year alone three different federal cases trying to block regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. When the best scientists in the whole world are saying this is an urgent crisis, and when the governments are responding, it's time for the automakers to quit litigating and start innovating and producing clean cars.

More than a dozen states have followed California's lead and have adopted tough new emissions standards.

Both Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell and Governor Jim Douglas praised the ruling.

They said the California decision upholds the right of states to require aggressive pollution control measures for vehicles.

"The defendants have combined to create a Presidential primary election with a stunningly anti-democratic scenario - every one of the more than 4.25 million registered Democratic voters in Florida will be completely disenfranchised and their constitutional rights with respect to that election will be rendered meaningless," the suit alleges.

The suit is being filed by Sen. Bill Nelson and Rep. Alcee Hastings in response to the DNC's decision last month to disqualify all of Florida's delegates to next year's national party convention. A spokesman for Nelson declined to comment and said the senator will make a statement on Thursday.

Dean had pushed for the punishment because Florida violated the party's rule against holding presidential primaries before Feb. 5. Both parties are struggling to retain control of the primary calendar even as states attempt to become more relevant by holding their voting at the beginning of the process.

By punishing Florida, Dean hopes to stave off other defections from the approved calendar.

"Their primary essentially won't count, " Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean told a Florida newspaper in June. "Anybody who campaigns in Florida is ineligible for delegates."

The Democratic presidential candidates have responded by pledging not to campaign in states which break the party's rules, like Florida.

The lawsuit alleges that taking such a drastic action violates the Constitution and the law in several ways.

The suit says the decision imposes "geographic discrimination" that violates the equal rights provisions of the Constitution and effectively eliminates the free expression of speech by the state's residents on behalf of the candidates.
Also, the suit alleges that minority voters will be hurt because the Republican primary will go forward as usual, while the Democratic primary will not count.

"Minority members who are predominantly registered as Democratic voters, will suffer a disproportionate impact by virtue of the exclusion of Democratic voters," the suit alleges.

The suit asks the court for an injunction that would ban the DNC from going forward with their threatened punishment. In addition to legal arguments, the suit uses harsh language to accuse the DNC of violations.

"In the annals of modern politics, no national party has inflicted so devastating and sweeping a "geographic discrimination" upon an entire state's electorate consisting exclusively of members of its own party," the suit says.

A spokeswoman for the DNC declined to comment on the suit, saying they had not "been given the courtesy of seeing the claims" made against the national party.

"It's disappointing that after months of trying to resolve this situation, they have chosen this path," said spokeswoman Stacie Paxton.

Liberals fear him. Conservatives distrust him. But all eyes will be on Kennedy as the court opens its 2007-08 term Monday with a string of major cases on the horizon that appear headed for 4-to-4 deadlocks.

Among them is a dispute over gun rights in Washington, D.C., a battle over the legal rights of terror suspects at the Guantánamo detention center, and a challenge to the president's power to order state judges to uphold international court rulings.

In addition, the high court will examine whether execution by lethal injection in Kentucky is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and whether the Constitution forbids Indiana from requiring voters to produce photo identification prior to casting a ballot.

The same internal dynamics among the justices that produced a string of conservative victories on abortion, affirmative action, and campaign finance last term will again be on full display. But this term, Kennedy's positions on pending cases are less clear.

Some analysts say the highest-profile cases this year are likely to bring a broader mix of both liberal and conservative victories. But several of the cases appear too close to call, court watchers say.

One of the most anticipated cases involves a landmark legal dispute over the meaning of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The justices are being asked to decide whether this is an individual right that belongs to the people or a collective right bestowed by the states through organized militias.

The court has not yet agreed to take up the issue, but many constitutional scholars believe it soon will. If so, it would mark the first time since 1939 that the Supreme Court has examined the meaning of the Second Amendment.

Two related cases, District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290) and Parker v. District of Columbia (07-335), involve challenges to gun-control laws in the nation's capital. The disputes will take the justices back to the drafting of the Bill of Rights and the foundations of the republic, analysts say.

"This is 1791 for the Second Amendment," Georgetown Law Center Prof. Nicholas Rosenkranz told a recent conference at the Cato Institute in Washington.

Among cases already on the court's docket, one of the most important involves terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and to what extent they are entitled to challenge their open-ended detention as enemy combatants.

Lawyers for the detainees filed habeas corpus petitions asking federal judges in Washington to examine the legality of their clients' continued confinement. The Bush administration says that because the detainees are foreign enemy combatants being held outside the United States, they are not entitled to the protections of habeas corpus. In 2006 Congress, then controlled by Republicans, passed a law that stripped federal judges of jurisdiction to hear cases brought on behalf of detainees at Guantánamo.

When lawyers for the detainees first asked the Supreme Court to take up the issue, the justices refused. Then, in a highly unusual move, the justices agreed three months later to hear the appeal. This has led to speculation that the court is primed to overturn an earlier federal appeals court ruling upholding the Bush administration's position and the 2006 law.

Some analysts go even further. "The court took this case to make a larger statement of who we are as a people," says Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown Law Center, who also represents a Guantánamo detainee in a pending case.

Professor Katyal, speaking on a recent panel at Georgetown, said the court will probably rule that fundamental rights apply at Guantánamo. "I expect a broader holding than we have had in the past," he added.

Supporters of the Bush administration say the court is unlikely to take such a dramatic step – even six years after the 9/11 attacks. The US is still at war, they say.

Google is watching you. But you already knew that. Every time you conduct a search using its search engine, Google keeps tabs—and uses the information to send you ads tailored to the interests and tastes suggested by your searches.

Here's something you probably didn't know: The company may let you close the blinds, digitally speaking. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told legislators on Sept. 27 that the company is exploring whether to let users keep Google from tracking the sites they're visiting. To do so, the company would enable Web surfers to shut off so-called cookies, the bits of code used to track the sites visited by individual computers and deliver ads related to those sites. Schmidt outlined that and other steps in an e-mail to Senator Charles Schumer read during a Senate hearing concerning Google's proposed purchase of DoubleClick. Google also is investigating technology that would keep user data collected from different sources from being concentrated in one place, and ways to better notify customers of Google's data-collection practices.

Government Influence

The proposals demonstrate the lengths to which Google may go in exchange for government approval of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad outfit DoubleClick, which specializes in ad placements across the Web. Senators on the Judiciary Committee also heard from Google opponents, including Microsoft, that would like to see the deal blocked. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told senators that they should not let the deal go forward without rules governing how information can be collected and used, and how long it can be kept.

Senators can't block the deal, but they can influence the thinking of the Federal Trade Commission, which will ultimately decide whether to let it go forward. The most likely scenario is that the FTC will propose restrictions on how Google and DoubleClick can combine the information they collect—if it decides to do anything at all. In July, the FTC approved a similar $6 billion acquisition by Microsoft of aQuantive, a DoubleClick competitor. The government agency also approved Yahoo!'s  $680 million acquisition of the 80% of online ad exchange Right Media that it did not yet own.

An Industry Issue

Opponents say owning DoubleClick will give Google too much control over online advertising, and in particular the user data collected and stored on Google's massive computers. Google counters by saying the whole online advertising industry is in the midst of consolidation. As the number of Web sites where people spend their time has grown, online ad giants have acquired ad networks to expand the number of users they can monitor and the number of sites on which they can place ads. In testimony before the committee, Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond argued that despite the search leader's success (more than 60% of searches are performed on the company's site and it brings in roughly 75% of all search ad revenue) it's no different from competing online advertising players, particularly Microsoft. "This is an industry issue," said Drummond. "That is how these issues should be worked out, not in the context of one company."

Google said it would welcome global privacy laws governing how Web companies obtain, combine, retain, and use the massive amounts of data collected on the Web surfing and searching habits on individual computers. But it doesn't want those rules to apply solely to its deal with DoubleClick. Through its general counsel, Brad Smith, Microsoft also said it would support privacy legislation.

Pipeline or Choice?

However, Smith and Scott Cleland, president of Precursor, a telecom research and consulting firm, also argued vehemently for rules that would treat Google differently from its main search competitors. According to Smith and Cleland, Google's dominance of search and access to the advertisers and sites that work with DoubleClick would enable the company to become a "pipeline" through which most of the Web's relevant data would flow. The reason, they argued, is that Google's ability to reach the majority of U.S. Web surfers on the most highly trafficked Web sites would be so great that advertisers would be forced to work with the company.

And, with Google's access to advertisers, any publishers not working with Google would also feel they had to work with the company, further increasing Google's reach. As a result, Google would be able to potentially collect Web surfing data on most Internet users, which would also lead to increased advertiser reliance on the company. "In a lot of ways it would be like combining the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ," Microsoft's Smith said. "Somebody could build an alternative exchange, but would anybody go there to take their company public?…this merger is about creating a single pipeline."

Drummond argued that Google—whose main business is selling ads based on search keywords and then displaying those ads on its search pages, as well as the partner sites those same searchers visit—is not in the same business as DoubleClick, which delivers ads that an advertiser and Web publisher have contracted for outside of DoubleClick's site. "There is no pipe," said Drummond. "A user, at a moment's notice, can go use another and they do all the time…there are all kinds of choices."

Whether the government will single out Google at all is an open question. The hearing was the first round of what Senator Herb Kohl  called a "heavyweight fight." In the next round, Google, Microsoft, and others plan to speak about privacy issues before the FTC at a two-day "town hall" meeting, starting Nov. 1.

At that point, Porter will have saved Craig from yet another of the senator's bizarre errors in judgment.

Compounding his previous errors, the Idaho Republican this week sent lawyers to persuade Porter to undo his guilty plea and let him go to trial. As Craig says, he wants ``to clear my name.''

He probably doesn't mean he wants to clear his name of the taint of a disorderly conduct conviction.

He means, of course, he wants to clear it of any link to homosexuality. He will have a hard time doing that because technically, officially, he isn't charged with homosexuality. Technically, officially, it is no longer a crime in America to be gay. The U.S. Supreme Court said so ages ago, in 2003.

No, Craig was instead charged with being disorderly because the officer in the next stall took his peculiar hand and foot movements as a sexual come-on.

A bogus charge? You betcha, as they say here in Minnesota. There is simply nothing criminal about toe-tapping, shoe-to-shoe contact or someone putting his hand beneath a bathroom stall divider, as one of his lawyers, Billy Martin, told the judge at this week's hearing.

``None of those facts, in and of themselves, constitute a crime,'' Martin told Porter. It would be a ``manifest injustice'' to let the conviction stand, he argued.

Guilty Plea

He's right. But the law makes it almost impossible to set aside a guilty plea. And Craig had weeks to decide whether to admit guilt before he mailed in his plea, as the prosecution noted.

Since then, he has had weeks to think what might happen in the improbable event that he gets a trial.

Police would testify that closeted gay men (like Craig?) pose a menace when they troll public bathrooms for sex.

They might say that this particular bathroom at this particular airport had become famous on the Internet as a rendezvous point for men seeking men.

As for Craig's actual conduct, remember that he exposed no part of his body that is normally covered, nor did he fondle or grope or grab anyone.

But the prosecutor in the case, Christopher Renz, can make even the running of a hand beneath a stall divider sound like soft-core porn.

Stroking the Divider

``Repeated stroking of the stall divider,'' Renz called it at this week's hearing, ``each stroke showing more of his left hand.''

Then there would be the chance that the judge might let the prosecution put on the stand the man who told the Idaho Statesman he had sex with Craig in the men's room of Union Station in Washington.

Does Craig really want that?

In his defense, Craig might raise his ``wide stance'' to explain away the apparent attempt at footsie. And it would be ridiculed, as it has been already, mercilessly.

The best Craig could get is a jury focused only on the facts of what he did, a jury that labors to see whether that conduct met the legal elements of disorderly conduct.

Throw in a little reasonable doubt, and Craig just might get acquitted.

So what? He would stand acquitted of disorderly conduct, which no one cares about anyway, aside from legal wonks like me. There would be no verdict on whether he committed homosexual conduct, which is all his Grand Old Party and his ``family values'' constituents care about.

Muddying His Name

But there would have been lots of testimony that would do more to muddy his name than clear it.

Fortunately for Craig, Porter seemed to be buying none of Martin's argument, except for when he said the law makes it ``next to impossible'' to set aside a guilty plea.

Fortunately for Craig, the judge argued with Martin on matters large and small.

When Martin said his client wanted to plead innocent, Porter interrupted to chide him on a point that was clearly meant to be more rhetorical than legal. There is no such plea in Minnesota, the judge told Porter.

Here, as elsewhere, you are either guilty or not guilty, he said.

It's an obvious point, and yet it is one that Craig seems to have missed. There is no way he will be declared innocent, even if he wins a trial and is found not guilty.