Personal Lives

Have Laptop, Will Practice

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Urban professionals like lawyer Jim Moylan are using technology to keep their careers despite moves to resort towns.

Moylan has associates and a secretary at a Chicago law firm. But he conducts his securities and commodities practice from Steamboat Springs, Colo., using fax and e-mail to stay in touch.

The New York Times reports that telecommuters like Moylan are migrating to resort playgrounds such as Nantucket, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Teton County, Idaho.

Jonathan Schechter, executive director of the Charture Institute in Jackson, Wyo., a nonprofit organization that studies small recreational towns, told the newspaper the migration is transforming these rural areas.

“The same processes that led to the suburbanization of the United States after World War II,” Schechter said, “are now producing a virtual suburbanization in places like Jackson or Steamboat Springs.”

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