A law firm’s proximity ranks up there with its fax speed, quality of bound volumes, and mainframe power

Back in the day, outside counsel made in-house calls. They came to the offices of corporate clients. Back then they plied calling cards in pay phones, admired correcto-type on Selectrics, smoked in offices, and licked stamps on envelopes. Proximity mattered in the kindler, gentler and slower eras gone by.

Today, with BlueTooth devices, texting, instant messaging, PDFs shot by email, voicemail automatically forwarded or transcribed, e-rooms, videoconferences, holographic virtualization (just wanted to see if you were actually paying attention), PDAs of every kind, built in webcams …Who even knows or needs to know where the peripatetic counsel is at this moment? The location of a partner matters hardly at all once you have met someone a couple of times and worked with them on a couple of matters.