Dahlia Lithwick worked for two years in a family law firm in Reno, Nev. She is writing a novel about how divorce affects children.

Live or Memorex? Let's go to the tape:

Late yesterday afternoon, while I am tapping out the words "Holy Roman Empire" to describe Microsoft, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson uses the words "benevolent despot" to describe them to their chief economic witness (flipping said witness's own grocery-store analogy better than the omelet chef at Circus, Circus). Lesson to witnesses: Those analogies can and will bite you in the ass if you let them off their leashes for so much as a minute.

Or try this: Richard Schmalensee, Microsoft's final expert in the case, testifies yesterday on his direct examination about the explosion in Web-based applications and Judge Jackson wonders aloud why software vendors aren't "writing Web-based applications in droves." Two hours earlier (at 11:50 Pacific Time) someone called Paul Festa writes on C/Net News an article titled "Web-based Applications Debut in Droves."

Cut to this morning. Sullivan & Cromwell's Michael Lacovara, leading Schmalensee back through the judge's "in droves" comment of yesterday, offers into evidence Defendant's Exhibit No. 2789--a C/Net article by Paul Festa titled "Web-based Applications Debut in Droves." Laughs Lacovara, "Sometimes, Your Honor, you just get lucky." The judge laughs too, calls the article "prescient," and listens carefully as Schmalensee testifies that there are no barriers to entry for Microsoft competitors seeking to develop Web-based applications.

The 60 or more journalists packing the courtroom (Boies' cross-examinations will do that) for this second-to-last day of testimony in the Microsoft trial all write this down. Weird. Yesterdays news becomes yesterday's comment by the judge becomes today's evidence will be tonight's story. Moments before, Lacovara examines Schmalensee on something he's downloaded from the Internet hours earlier. Then, he questions him on a Washington Post story (from today) about AOL's support for 3Com's Palm Pilots allowing its users e-mail access. Throughout this trial, articles written the previous day--sometimes by journalists seated just on the other side of the bar--have morphed into evidence.

What does it mean when the folks reporting the trial are also creating it? Is this the information superhighway's equivalent of the high-speed chase of O.J. in the white Bronco? It certainly shores up the sense that both high technology and those who report on it move faster than the speed of justice. No one doubts anymore that long after this case has been decided by the media, the markets, and the microchip, it will still be grinding its way through the appellate courts and beyond.

Which brings us to how David Boies--the attorney hired by Justice to lead the plaintiff's team in this case--makes a witness look bad.

First he says, in the hour before lunch and without a scintilla of awkwardness, "Good-morning-Dean-Schmalensee-I have-to-ask-you-an-awkward-question." Then he asks Microsoft's chief economic witness how much Microsoft has paid him.

"Ever?" asks Schmalensee.