Mary Crane leads workshops on business etiquette for major law firms and Fortune 200 companies, so she’s answered her share of thorny workplace-life questions. But two years ago, she heard a problem that boggled her mind. She had just finished telling a group of law students that sending handwritten thank-you notes to their interviewers will help them stand out from the pack, when one said, “But I’ve never written in the cursive style.”

Welcome to Generation Y, the newest crop of lawyers-in-training.