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.