I work for Juris plc, a medium-sized law firm engaged in the supply of corporate legal services on a global basis.

The base office in Swindon is staffed by 11 workgroup directors and a floating population of about 40 support staff whose numbers fluctuate according to the current tasking requirements of the business plan.There are six solicitors in my work group, which is mainly concerned with commercial construction and financing in Northern Europe.

Only the work group director works from the base office.

The rest of us work from our homes, in England, Los Angeles, Ankara and Milan.

Of the home-based members, I am the only one with ambitions to work from the base office because with three children I need the money.

The others are happy to trade in a higher salary for a more relaxed life-style.My house came with a fully fitted office, including hardware and business machines.

My machine is a van Straten 'Superfast', with a 12-gigabyte hard disk and 164 megabytes of RAM.

At the heart of the machine is an Intel 'Pisat' 600 MHz CPU.

Because I never go off-line, my interface is a Microsoft 'Mirror-Net' browser which doubles up as a large chunk of the operating system as well.

I use a 90cm screen because there is so much to get on it.I work from 6am to 9.30 am and from 2pm until 6 or 7pm because of the different time zones to which the various work group members are subject.

I start my day by giving the voice command 'let's go'.

My European colleague's status boxes are bright and glowing, but Los Angeles is, as yet, unlit.

As usual, my mail box contains some 30 or 40 items, all prioritised, and grouped according to type.

I open the junk mail first -- it is now a legal requirement that all unsolicited mail must be identified as such -- because its use of expensive video and sou nd content cheers me up.

There is also a video-card from the chairman of the Law Society, apologising for the fact that the annual premium will be £22,000 this year.

In the bad old days solicitors actually had to pay money to the Law Society.

Now the premium has been credited to my private account at Lawbank, which is owned by the Law Society and came into being with the advent of universal on-line banking.

All solicitors who keep their accounts there are entitled to an equal share of the profits.

As I am scanning the rest of my messages, my diary kicks in, and begins arranging its pages across the top of the screen.

The priorities are an exchange of contracts and a video conference with a new commercial client.

This will involve three members of our work group, the new client, and possibly someone from another work group with expertise in south-east Asian financing.The Milan box begins to chime, so I enlarge it and see my Italian colleague, Edouard, smiling sheepishly.

He clearly has a hangover.

He will be involved in the client conference later on in the day, so I suggest that he read through the proposal again and get some more sleep.

He agrees, and fades out.At 9.30am I break and, as the children are on holiday, I spend the morning taking them riding.

After lunch and a short nap, I get back to work on the exchange of contracts.

The contract, to which my clients have appended their signature file, is on my hard disk.

I bring up my exchange contracts application, and make video contact with my opposite number in York via the Internet.

On my screen I type in the right amount of digicash for the deposit, and when we are both ready, we simultaneously click the 'exchange now' buttons on our screens.

In something under four seconds, our respective client's contracts are cut and pasted to each others' hard disks, and at the same time, the deposit is transferred from our Lawbank client account to theirs.

When closing the application, I am prompted to send confirmation of exchange to the clients, agents, lenders and whoever else might be interested.

I click on the OK button and standard E-mail messages are posted automatically.

Our conference with the new client is due to start at 5pm.

About 20 minutes beforehand I put on a fresh shirt and tie and check in with our office receptionist.

When there are four or five people at a video conference it is often a good idea to have a co-ordinator.

Sally, my colleague in Los Angeles, is now on line, as is Edouard, and Iain the work group director.

We chat for a while, until the receptionist breaks in and tells us that the client is parked at our website, having a look at our home page.

This is a rough equivalent to sitting in the waiting room, flicking through the firm's brochure.

Our receptionist tells the client that we are now ready, and counts us down to the meeting.