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The attorney's own realm is no different from any other revenue-generating quarter -- e-commerce or good old-fashioned bricks and cement -- in one truism of the Technology Age: Document management is the most daunting challenge for today's law office. Regardless of the size of the law firm, mountains of file folders and forests of paper are piling up daily in every law office as quickly, and as momentously, as in the offices of their clients. Traditionally, the answer to this challenge has been to hire more clerical staff, more paralegals, and more attorneys and then to scramble to assess and assign outsourcing contracts to help erode some of the paper mountains popping up all around the legal-office landscape.

The small town of Storrs, CT, may soon become the center of the law-blog universe. Andrew W. Ewalt, a solo practicing in the shadows of the University of Connecticut, is a guinea pig for the wildly growing technology, which to date has largely been passed over by the legal profession as a marketing tool.

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You've been there and know the terrain: The law breaks property into two categories -- real and personal. If the object of a transaction is found to be personal property, then it is subsequently categorized as either tangible or intangible. In the realm of interconnected networked computers, however, although broadly categorized as personal property, Internet property has characteristics of tangible and intangible property. Consequently, attorneys must take the special nature of Internet property into consideration when attempting to resolve or avoid legal difficulties relating to an Internet transaction, something, of course, to which e-commerce ventures find themselves at ongoing risk and dealing in round-the-clock daily.

The advantages of doing business in a digital economy -- paperless transactions, instant communication, effortless administration and reaching out across borders to far-away locations to collaborate with partners in a virtual community -- are precisely the risks of doing business in a digital economy.

When a number of blogs posted secret details and drawings of Apple Computer's new music technology -- code-named Asteroid -- Apple's lawyers did what lawyers do: They sued the Web sites to find out the posters' identities and sources.

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Every time someone hits the "send" button, evidence is created -- and electronic evidence is something with which e-commerce ventures, by their very e-nature, must be concerned. They must also come up with elements in their business-process plans to deal with compliance or other legal matters arising from e-mail.

The American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association, along with state bars nationwide that support the two groups, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to rule once and for all that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has no right to hold lawyers to certain privacy provisions in the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

No technology issue concerns -- or should concern -- individuals, e-commerce and government regulators more than Internet identity theft. The statistics are staggering. In the last year, LexisNexis reported that unauthorized people apparently took personal information on more than 30,000 Americans from its database -- by stealing logins and passwords of legitimate customers. Another data broker, ChoicePoint Inc., reported a possible theft of similar data from as many as 145,000 people through individuals claiming to have legitimate and legal use for the data they purchased from ChoicePoint. But those numbers look small (except, of course, to the affected individuals) when compared with the identity-theft problem acknowledged by Bank of America -- involving about 1.2 million federal employees.