January 16, 1983

At Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine, a maid carries a tray of iced tea and cookies around to all the firm's lawyers every afternoon. It's a bit of elegance from the past that the 50-year-old Rockefeller Center firm still clings to. That kind of respect for tradition may, however, be part of the firm's problem. For Donovan Leisure has protected its tradition of mid-afternoon refreshments better than it has protected its practice of law. The large antitrust cases that formed the core of its work for decades have dried up and the firm has found nothing to take their place. Donovan Leisure is not alone. Many major law firms today are under financial pressure. Deregulation in Washington, the long-lived recession and the resulting cost-consciousness of corporate clients have all contributed to their woes. For these firms, a new era has dawned, one in which the practice of law has ceased to be a gentlemanly profession and instead has become an extremely competitive business.

ROSLYN HEIGHTS ARE conversions of rental apartment buildings to cooperatives on the Island beginning to approach the dimensions of the phenomenon in New York City? If so, what are the implications for the availability of housing in Nassau and Suffolk Counties? Lee E. Koppelman, director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, said there was good news and bad news about co-op conversions. For building owners, he said, conversion is ''an attempt to recapitalize and make a profit.'' Another plus is that owning apartments gives people a greater interest in the property and has a stabilizing influence on their communities. ''But,'' Mr. Koppelman asked, ''what happens to the people who can't afford to buy? To the extent that you take housing off the market, you exacerbate the existing shortage of rental units on Long Island.''

Interest is growing within the Italian and West German Governments in an ''interim solution'' on the deployment of new NATO medium-range nuclear missiles at the end of the year. In practical terms, this means there is increased receptiveness in these countries for the idea that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization can reduce the number of American missiles it plans to station if the Soviet Union is willing to reduce its total of SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe. Semantically, at least, this does not signify abandoning NATO's current position - offering cancellation of its plans to install 572 Pershing 2 and cruise missiles if the Soviet Union scraps all its SS-20's - because hope is still expressed that both sides could reduce their totals to zero in continued negotiations over the next four or five years. Substantive Change Seen But according to Government officials in Rome and Bonn, the thinking does represent a substantive change in that it suggests that the United States would have to move away from its bargaining situation in which the Soviet Union would be required to junk all its SS-20's to reach any kind of early agreement on limitation of the medium-range weapons.

Long Island is preparing to enter the nuclear age, ending its near-total dependence on imported oil, with the completion of a reactor to provide a third of its electricity. But the plant is 10 years late and 10 times over budget, the most expensive reactor ever built, and its cost will probably make the area's bills the highest in the nation. The price of the reactor will be $3.1 billion if commercial operation begins by September, according to the Long Island Lighting Company, but more delays seem likely. If the cost is passed along to the utility's consumers, as expected, the result will be rate increases estimated by Lilco at 38 percent, more if the plant is frequently shut for maintenance. So far, customers' bills have reflected only a small amount of the reactor's cost. The rest of the money has come from Lilco's retained earnings and from money borrowed by the sale of bonds.

DURING the years that William K. Ketchum commuted an hour and a halff rom his home in Berkeley Heights, N. J., to American Telephone and T elegraph's Long Lines Division headquarters at 32 Avenue of the A mericas in Manhattan, he left his house at 7 in the morning and did n ot return until around 6 at night. Now that Long Lines has moved to the Somerset County countryside, next to Interstate Highway 287 and just 20 minutes from his home, Mr. Ketchum still leaves Berkeley Heights at 7 A.M. and does not see his family again until dinnertime after 6 P.M. Mr. Ketchum, a personnel director, spends that extra time - a gain of nearly two and one-half hours a day - at work, in his carpeted office with smoked-gray windows looking out over a parking deck, wide expanses of lawn and an endless stretch of hardwood trees that in winter forms a gray suburban skyline. That kind of rural view has replaced the spires of New York for thousands of employees who have been transferred from the city to the 34 million square feet of new office buildings that have been built into the Morris and Somerset County hills since the early 1970's.