"Far and away, the leading demand I am getting for lawyers" is in the telecommunications field, said David Landau, of the D.C. legal recruiting firm of Klein, Landau, Romm & North.

Spurred by the new law, more than 80 rule-making proceedings are underway at the Federal Communications Commission, and each could set off appeals in state and federal courts for years to come -- triggering more work for regulatory lawyers and litigators.

Meanwhile, the industry is undergoing a massive restructuring with a spate of mergers, some involving giants such as British Telecommunications PLC and MCI Communications Corp., said Covington & Burling's Charles R. (Rick) Rule, who does communications-related antitrust work. At a different level, technology startup companies and spin-offs offer their own plate of legal concerns.

An explosion in technology -- the Internet, satellite communications and PCS -- also generates new business. Each advance spurs changes in regulation, spawns new enterprises and creates novel legal issues, said Philip Verveer, a regulatory specialist at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher. For instance, one new technology will enable people to identify the location of calls made from cellular phones, said Verveer, and that raises all sorts of privacy and marketing issues.

"It is the fastest-growing practice area we have," said Ralph Savarese of Howrey & Simon, whose "IP" group has doubled since 1994 to 100 lawyers.

Companies that make huge investments in new technology are "determined to protect these investments," he said, and do so by filing lawsuits to enforce their patents. It is often complex, high-stakes litigation, requiring the legal battalions that once fought antitrust wars.

Just as in telecommunications, technology is the driver. Asked why "IP" is so hot, Jim Burdett, a partner in the D.C. office of Venable, answered succinctly: "The Internet. People are gaga over the Internet."

Entrepreneurs are doing business "not from the storefront but from the Web site," he said. The new venue raises novel concerns. For instance, it is illegal to sell certain products to minors, but how can you ensure that your customers on the Internet are adults?

There is also a boom in cases filed by the owners of old patents, "who never envisioned an Internet" but now "are trying to leap on the Internet bandwagon," accusing others of infringing on their ideas, said Burdett, who represents their adversaries. These folks are hoping for "a stream of royalties the likes of which only IBM or Texas Instruments could contemplate," Burdett argues, and they're generating much of the boom in IP work, he said.

The regulatory changes "have led to hundreds of filings and a lot of proceedings" before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said Steptoe & Johnson's J.A. "Lon" Bouknight, a specialist in the field. Battles also are brewing in Congress and before state regulatory commissions.

And, "as always happens in an industry where . . . competition is being inserted, you've got mergers," Bouknight said. About a dozen, including the proposed merger of Potomac Electric Power Co. and Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., are in the works around the nation.

The deals "do require lots of lawyers," said Neal S. McCoy, who heads the busy D.C. corporate practice at New York's Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. And other specialties, such as antitrust, tax, environment and employee benefits, tend to follow the merger, he said.

The deals "come in all shapes and sizes," said Paul Rothenberg, a legal consultant with the McCormick Group in Arlington. Some involve international players; others are occurring around the Beltway. Even firms not known for M&A are getting in on the act.

For instance, the recent construction of a $1.3 billion electric power plant in the Philippines involved players from France, Britain and the United States, including two major Washington financial agencies, according to Victor DeSantis of the D.C. office of White & Case. Like other complex transactions with a wide array of investors and institutions, it kept scores of lawyers at several law firms quite busy.

There was less agreement among experts about the practices that have cooled this year, but, along with bankruptcy, their picks included banking and white-collar criminal defense.

Banking law has been hurt by the continuing wave of bank consolidations, which means fewer banks to hire outside counsel. In the white-collar defense field, lawyers involved in the burst of independent counsel investigations have enjoyed a boomlet, but there is no business generator to match the broad-based investigations of savings and loans in the early 1990s that made this a big-buck specialty.

Still, with business growing spectacularly, these practices "may be on the back burner but they're not in the deep freeze," said McCormick Group legal consultant Lyles Carr.

In the criminal defense field, for instance, health care fraud still is a lucrative area, and cybercrime, or financial fraud on the Internet, is about to heat up.