Who said lawyers are not early adopters? Check out "This Week in Law Journal History" in the New Jersey Law Journal (reprinted below). It was only 25 years ago when solo Ben Zander was contemplating computers vs. word processors. Shortly after that, IBM 80236 computers started to proliferate in law offices and the rage was WordStar, then WordPerfect for DOS.
As we now look at quad-core processors and 64-bit computing on Intel and AMD processors, have we come very far? Although computers have more RAM and software, better peripherals, and faster processors, they really haven't come a long ways since the 1980s. Until programmers can exploit the 64-bit instruction across multiple cores, simultaneously, most computers are still doing just one thing at a time, albeit very, very fast.
25 Years Ago
November 8, 1984: The Law Journal 's first reporter-written article profiled Summit solo Ben Zander, one of the first lawyers in New Jersey to integrate the personal computer — still in its infancy --into his daily practice. The author pondered, "Is this the law office of the future --a terminal on every attorney's desk? Or will only a few zealots marry their practices to the computer, while most lawyers opt for word processors, billing programs and legal research data bases such as Lexis and Westlaw?
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