Computer companies made themselves useful to Legal Companies

My brother was a lawyer, a partner is a successful law firm. Money seemed to flow naturally in his direction.

His firm bought laptops for each of its lawyers and subscribed to a service that indexed every legal decision in the past, which made it easy for them to reference them in any case they had pending.

They could see that information (properly processed) was essential in their profession. The trick (as with all Artificial Intelligence) was in understanding the processing that made it useful. If you did not understand that, you could end up looking stupid.

This had always been the case (you had to be smart, to look smart) but now lawyers had to understand computers (or actually computer software), a skill set entirely different from their own.

This is true for any profession now, you have to understand computers, and they keep getting harder to understand.