The Law Planet Blog

With the announcement and release of Apple's iPhone, I got to thinking about how we got here. This is a phone, with internet and a music/video player. We now have $100 fax machines, cellular telephones with internet access and refrigerators with built-in screens and Web browsers. Now, I'm not sure why one would want to surf the net while getting a pint of cookies n' cream, but I'm not a technology designer either.

My kids have never owned a vinyl record. My son's first music device played cassettes. They both have had portable CD players and now iPods. My daughter donated her "old" iPod shuffle to me. I can play MP3s on any audio system in my house thanks to wireless music streaming on my home network. I still eat my meals the old-fashioned way, though, at a table with silverware on plates. But I'm sure Apple's working on the iMeal that will have everyone salivating.

I was talking to my new friend, Kerri, recently and told her that my first computer modem was 2400 baud, which is 2.4K for most folks. And my employer paid around $600 for it. Kerri asked me if I had to insert the phone handset into the modem for it to work. I told her that we had advanced past that technology at that point. To see an example of an acoustic coupler at work, get a copy of War Games with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.

I then asked Kerri if she had ever heard of a Qwip machine. Qwip was among the first, if not the first, fax machines that I ever had an experience with. My father's firm (he is also a lawyer) had at least two. They used special silver-colored paper and a rotating drum. You could only fax or receive one page at a time. No way would opposing counsel send you that 100 page motion at 5:00 on a Friday with one of these babies. The fax wouldn't finish until Monday morning. It used an acoustic coupler. Now, a $400 laptop has a 56K fax/modem, and no need for an acoustic coupler.

These technology advances were designed, and sold to us, to make our lives easier. When was the last time you were happy that your fax machine rang? And let's not forget that people now send faxes and then send the same thing via FedEx (because it "absolutely, positively" had to get there overnight). Recently, a secretary from a large firm in New York called to confirm receipt of a fax. I asked her, "Why, did you get an error message on your end?" She said that no, she didn't, but her boss insisted that she call to make sure it was received. So this lawyer thought that his secretary and my office had nothing better to do than to verify what his technology already told him, that the fax went through. He's probably the kind of person who re-opens the mailbox to make sure his letter dropped in.

Here at The Law Planet, we try to use the technology to make us more efficient and save our clients money. It is much cheaper for our clients to have us burn a CD with 5,000 pages on it than it is to copy 5,000 pages and send them by carrier pigeon. We are supposed to rule the technology, the technology is not supposed to rule us. So please, don't call to confirm receipt of a fax. And whatever you do, don't send us a fax and then FedEx the same documents that night. One or the other will suffice, thanks.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.