September marks a time of transition here on the prairie; the oppressive heat of summer is giving way to the more temperate climes of fall and the cultivators, sprayers and mowers that are the hallmarks of summer field work make way for the lords of the harvest – the combines, grain trucks, and gravity wagons.
September is also County Fair season, a time when the best, brightest, and coolest are showcased in newly painted barns and newly mown fields; a time for the 4H and FFA kids to shine, for Miss Emma to prove once again that her apple pie still rains supreme, and for the local implement dealer to demo the latest in super-tractors (an event that can best be described as a Top Gear’s slower cousin).
While I must admit that a certain amount of lust runs down my spine when a super-tractor shoots past, 600 Hp diesel bellowing, at an outstanding 8.5 Mph (sure that 458 Italia will go faster, but can it self-steer or carry 20,000 pounds?) I find that these masterpieces of agricultural technology lack that je ne sais quoi to be truly cool tech. For me, cool tech goes beyond the merely functional; cool tech needs to be transformative – it is not that the tech does the job or even does the job well, it is that because of this tech that the way my job gets done is fundamentally altered for the better.
The problem with cool tech is that someday, perhaps someday soon, it becomes common place. Back in the dim, dark recesses of the digital revolution (the ’80’s), when people still wrote theses on Selectrics a cool little program called LaTeX arrived on the scene and transformed scientific writing (mainly because most computer geeks and grad students lacked secretarial support and were willing to invest the time squinting at CRT’s and cursing EMACS rather than face a typewriter). Today WYSIWYG word processing and page layout are common place, but back then – Wow, oh Wow was it cool.
The problem with most lawyer tech is that it’s not all that cool; the paperless office is practically de-regueur, laptops are ubiqutious, and tablets have yet to have that breakthrough application that makes them transformative. Yes, I am fully aware that iPads are the current must have fashion technology and that there are 1000’s of extremely useful applications out there – but even with those vast numbers of apps, tablets seem intent on reproducing the functionality already available to laptop and desktop users abet with a slightly more unique and slightly less functional interface. The sad thing is that coolness lies just within the tablets‘ reach; it is just frustrated by the lack of the digital world equivalent of the fine line pen – I’ve yet to find a stylus/app combination that writes well, most seem intent on replicating the penmanship exercises from kindergarten (fat pencils, wide lines, huge letters and smudges) rather than of legal pad and pen. Frankly the odd short hand found in Palm PDA’s provided a better writing experience than the current crop of styli and handwriting apps.
I know that there is cool lawyer tech out there, hanging just the other side of the bleeding edge waiting to transform the world. Its just not made it out to the County Fair just yet.
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