Parked in deepest Blair country, just off Upper Street in north London's Islington district, the Business Design Centre once again played host to the Legal IT show last week.

The 2006 show did not take up as much space as in some previous years, but that may in part be because companies are using stands more becoming to what seem to be slightly more austere times. Only time will tell.


But, slowly, the legal profession is changing. A sign of the times at Legal IT was the proliferation of BlackBerry and various BlackBerry-like services offered by vendors to small to medium-sized firms. BlackBerrys are now almost like light switches to lawyers working in large firms, so ubiquitous have they become, and pretty much as idiot-proof. One IT director of a top-50 firm told the Gazette that the main problem with the devices was not technical, but that they got dropped down the toilet too often. This is high praise.


E-mail will probably be the primary method of communications for tomorrow's lawyer, and not being tied to a PC for it will be a matter of necessity. Even though one vendor ruefully told the Gazette that when he originally tried offering mobile e-mail, no one wanted it - 'at the time,' we pointed out - others are doing well out of it.


On the stand of a well-known mobile telecommunications company, there nestled a pile of BlackBerrys that turned out to be made of foam. 'Stressberries, we're calling them,' said the salesman. 'They call the real things Crackberries in the City,' he added with a grin. 'Once you get one, you can't stop using it.' It is called the 'puppy dog sale' in the trade, because BlackBerrys or their equivalents are like puppies to children - just try taking them away again.


The point is this: now that BlackBerrys have become ubiquitous, perhaps to the point where it would be impossible to shut the US service down without precipitating some kind of collapse of civilisation, they will become really cheap. And when they are cheap, everyone will have one, or something like it. A small firm lawyer who is not fiddling away on something like it on the train or in a café will look like he belongs in a previous century. And that will be because he does.