The Florida Bar: changing through technology.

• Author: Blankenship, Gary

A Year 2000 member of The Florida Bar might feel lost without a cell phone. Fifty years ago, a vital piece of equipment was the paperweight. "We had no air conditioning and no heat, so everybody had a little oscillating fan in their office," recalled Miami attorney Preston L. Prevatt, who clerked in the Miami office of Shutts & Bowen before joining it as a lawyer in 1953.

"The first thing you would do when you came in in the morning was turn on the oscillating fans and open the windows. You had paperweights on everything. Papers had been known to blow out of the windows onto Flagler Street. Title insurance companies gave paper-weights out as gifts, like calendars."

Indeed, much has changed around legal offices and in the practice of law in 50 years.

The clatter of manual typewriting keys has been replaced with the clicking of computer keyboards. The rustle of interleaved layers of typing and carbon paper has been supplanted by the hum of the printer. The scratch of the pen in recordbooks has given way to the whir of computer disks.

The equivalent of shelves of legal books are now available on computer screen at the touch of a button, either from a small CD-ROM disk or via online research.

Instead of waiting a few months for advances to bring word of appellate court decisions, now they can be found via the Internet within minutes of issuance.

There was also a different outlook.

"Everybody in the firm had gone through the Depression, either as a lawyer or as a child growing up, and then suffered through World War II, either at home or as a serviceman. Everybody was pretty conservative and didn't spend a lot of money," Prevatt said. "When you sent a letter, it was three cents regular mail or six cents air mail. We hardly ever ,Dent anything air mail; no one was in that much of a hurry and they wouldn't spend the extra money.

"A long distance call was expensive; that was an extravagance. Hardly anyone made long distance calls, things weren't that urgent. Frequently, we used to send telegrams for short messages that had to get there in a hurry."

There was another difference that many of today's debt-laden law students would appreciate. "Most of the young lawyers could go through part of their schooling through the GI Bill," Prevatt said. "A lot of people are practicing law who wouldn't have even thought about law school if it hadn't been for the GI Bill."

Veteran Florida lawyers can point to two major trends that perhaps no one saw when The...