You can distinguish generations of lawyers from their relationship with the telephone.
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I’m not talking about “recreational” use. That phone-hugging lout, weaving back and forth in front of you through the breakfast cereals aisle at the supermarket, has shortened your life by the time you had to listen to him. Sadly, public places have become mental extensions of people’s living rooms. Compared to its omnipresence in the world outside, the decline of telephony in the law office is more subtle and more important to your career.
The desktop telephone reached its apogee as professional tool in the 1980′s, when the above Bell Telephone commercial, part of a 10-year campaign featuring Canadian actor Larry Mann as “the Boss,” aired dozens of times a day. You can see in 1982, the phone company was still a monopoly and its only competition was Canada Post, who could communicate a thousand words for a 25 cent postage stamp.
