5 Obsolete Legal Technologies that Shouldn’t Be Obsolete

Lawyerist, which happens to be live-blogging some nerd confab in Illinois at the moment, recently admitted it doesn’t use quill pens or mimeographs anymore. More disappointingly, it came up with a somewhat blasphemous list of six legal technologies that should go the way of the Dodo bird, like the copier, fax machine, Dictaphone, and typewriter. Whatever. Except for the copier (which is too complicated for my liking), I use each one of these—and others, like the paperweight—in my practice and advise lawyers to do do the same. Why? We’ve moved far away from our inefficient but profitable origins and need to reclaim our hand-crafted bespoken heritage. For that reason, here are 5 fundamental legal technologies the tech gods believe are obsolete—but are just as good today and just as fundamentally sound as they were in 1984.