I don't know if you can find a nicer group of people to work with than the LegalSpan and inData people, especially Becky Weiner and Brent Sandstrom. We worked in the soon-to-become-famous "behind the bookshelf studio", which really did have a door that was hidden behind a bookshelf. Through that door, we entered the world of movie magic. If you love technology, every aspect of the process was fascinating. We taped in front of a gray backdrop and then could watch as the video feed got compressed and rendered into the form you will see it on the web site - the speaker standing at a podium in a virtual theater with PowerPoint slides appearing on a big screen by the speaker. The magic of digital processing.

In addition to our presentation on courtroom technology, Art gave presentations on improving the quality of your practice and legal issues for the Year 2000 Problem, Alan did a great talk on the practical issues of voice recognition with a ton of useful advice and a talk on the benefits of the Palm Pilot, and I covered the Year 2000 Problem at the PC level, law firm web pages, and a presentation based on my article last month about a technology agenda for law firms.

When not taping, we got to talk with the people at LegalSpan and inData Corp. about their new projects and tour their operations where real-time transcription, video depositions and heavy-duty document scanning happen. I regret that my arrangements with LegalSpan on these seminars now give me a conflict of interest so that I won't be able to write about some of the things they're doing. But here I'll tell you that they are doing some cool things and that people interested in courtroom presentation technology should keep their eyes on inData and products like Trial Director.

We also spent some time at lunch talking with Becky about continuing legal education and the trends in online delivery of programs. There are some developments coming soon that will answer most of the concerns program administrators have about giving CLE credits for attendance of online programs. But Becky spoke to bigger issue when she said, "this is not just about CLE credits, it's about information."

Yes! The true potential and power of online programming (especially as bandwidth and Internet access speeds increase) is not so much that you can get your required minimum number of credits, but that you can learn what you want from the people you want.

In most firms, it can be difficult to have the firm pay to send you to a program given by the premier expert in your field, especially if the program happens to be in Maui. Or, there might be one program you want to see in a day long program and you can't justify a whole day problem.

Many times what I wanted was to get a 15 or 20 minute discussion by a leading expert on a specific point. While we usually think in terms of articles, there's no reason it couldn't take the form of a short lecture program. In fact, when I had a project that involved some research on an esoteric project (and when I did estate planning, that was about every other of tax research I did), I preferred not to spend several hours researching articles, cases and then like and then trying to put together a picture of the complex area. I liked to get a good overview and the lay of the land and then start my research.

I call this approach "looking for a Tom Venker" after my former partner Tom Venker. The more complicated the problem, the more we wanted to just sit down with Tom for 20 or 30 minutes before we started to get his point of view on the issue. I still do. It could save hours of time in both research and in beginning to understand a problem.

This approach is also an evolution of one of my favorite hobbies - listening to lecture tapes from The Teaching Company (1-800-832-2412), a company that seeks out the best college professors they can find and then puts together tapes of their lectures on a variety of subjects. If you haven't heard of these, I highly recommend them, especially if you have a long commute.

Our trip to Phoenix gave us a glimpse of what the future will bring us and a good picture of the great things we can do already. Coming soon to a web browser near you.