When people ask me about my favorite apps for the iPhone, it occurs to me that while a few are legal-specific apps such as copies of rules and statutes and Black's Law Dictionary, many of the apps most useful to lawyers are the same apps that are useful to others -- Mail, Contacts, Maps, Quickoffice, Twitterific, Facebook, various weather apps, etc. In other words, while lawyers have lots of great iPhone apps to use, not many of them are lawyer-specific.
With WWDC going on this week, a lot of smart iPhone developers are thinking about new apps to create for which there is a demand. This has got me thinking -- what additional apps would it be nice to see in the legal arena? I'm not the only one having these thoughts. I recently received an e-mail from Jeff Nosanov, a new lawyer who recently got his J.D. from New York Law School and his LL.M. in Space and Telecommunications Law from the University of Nebraska. (What an interesting LL.M. to get!) Although Jeff is a new lawyer, he is also an iPhone programmer, and he told me that he was also wondering about the unmet app needs of iPhone-using attorneys.
I would love to see iPhone apps from some of the major developers of software used by law firms, such as a Westlaw app, an Interwoven Worksite (document management) app...
UPDATE: Just a few hours after this post went up, I see that Interwoven, recently purchased by Autonomy, is releasing an iPhone app for iManage Worksite. I really look forward to checking this out. Here is a press release and a demo. And now, I return you to this regularly scheduled post...
...a client for Elite (time entry and bill mangement), etc., but these are not the sort of apps to be created by developers outside of those companies, unless they are retained by the companies themselves. What would be a great app for lawyers that an independent developer could create?
Nothing is coming to my mind right now. For example, I can't think of any lawyer-specific apps that I used to use on my old Treo 650, and I've searched the Internet for lawyer-specific apps for the Blackberry and haven't found anything that isn't already available for the iPhone. But I have the nagging feeling that I am just not thinking of something obvious. Thus, I'm asking the readers of iPhone J.D. to help me crowdsource this question. Do you have a good idea for an iPhone app for lawyers? If so, I would love to hear about it in an e-mail, or better yet post a comment so that others can also see your ideas. Maybe an enterprising developer will see your request and create an app that can benefit all of us.
