The Chicago-based Sonnenschein law firm — a well respected firm with more than 700 lawyers and other professionals in 13 offices in the U.S. and Europe — started letting its lawyers use iPhones less than two years ago. Since then, the number of iPhone users at Sonnenschein has grown from zero to 30%. (The rest use Blackberries.) Apple now includes a feature on the law firm on its website.
Chris Lewis is the Manager of Software Services for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, which means that he manages the firm’s Citrix environment, software deployment, desktop platform, packaged applications, the Office Suite and mobility solutions. He is responsible for the deployment of iPhones at Sonnenschein, and Lewis himself uses an iPhone 3GS (and has an eye on the upcoming iPad).
In December of 2009, Lewis wrote an article for Peer to Peer, the magazine of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), describing the use of the iPhone at its firm. I saw the article last week when it was republished in TechnoLawyer’s weekly TechnoFeature newsletter. The article is aimed at IT professionals, but I think that most lawyers would find the article just as interesting as I did. Thus, I asked Lewis for permission to repost it here, which he graciously provided. Enjoy!
There’s An App For That: Bringing the iPhone into the Legal Environment
by Christopher Lewis
After I show a colleague the iPhone that’s provided by my firm, the most common statement I hear is, “Your firm does that?” While the iPhone is just plain cool, allowing you to mix your personal computing world (e.g., iTunes music) with your business computing world, the bottom line differentiator between the iPhone and other mobile devices is that it enhances the productivity of our attorneys when they are mobile. In our firm’s deployment of the iPhone, we’ve learned a lot of lessons, as well as the benefits of the iPhone in general and how to integrate with existing systems.
Our deployment started with the release of the 3.0 device, which is the first mobile device that addresses the majority of our business needs from a single mobile platform. Though the deployment of the iPhone at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP started out of pure client demand for the device, during our initial testing we quickly realized how valuable it would be for both our attorneys and our IS administrative staff.
The User Experience
I polled a number of users who had switched to the iPhone, and their most consistent comment related to the enhanced user experience. A number of people said it was “like having a small computer. I don’t even travel with my laptop anymore.”
From our firm’s perspective, perhaps the most important function of the iPhone is how it easily retrieves and correctly displays corporate e-mail messages and attachments. The iPhone delivers the best e-mail experience of any mobile device used at Sonnenschein. An attorney can see the formatting, including emphasis, as the client intended them to see it directly on the device – not just a plain text translation. Full fidelity is maintained with e-mail messages, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs. All are viewable, readable and formatted correctly. As one attorney in my feedback poll put it, “More and more clients are inserting redlined changes, photos and other objects into e-mail messages that cannot be viewed with any other e-mail device. Being able to see all of this emphasis and embedded objects without pulling out my laptop is great, and allows me to be much more responsive.”
Web Browsing and Portal
With the iPhone’s Safari browser, you see the Web as it was meant to be seen: just like it is on a computer and not a stripped-down mobile version. Apple did a phenomenal job with user interaction through finger flicks, pinching and the ability to toggle between landscape and portrait mode to quickly navigate a webpage. Prior to the iPhone, I would not spend much mobile time on the Web, saying to myself, “It’s not worth the aggravation, I’ll just wait until I get to a computer.” Now I do routine tasks like check my junk mail in Postini, update my presence status on our portal or even buy groceries on Peapod while sitting on the train.
More importantly, with respect to client service, one of our attorneys had this to say, “The ability to click on a link forwarded by a client while I’m on the road and to see the entire webpage in its full form is invaluable. Without this feature, I can’t respond to a client until I can get to a networked computer. With this feature, I can look at a webpage and respond instantly. There’s nothing like having Wikipedia, CNN, etc. at your fingertips when you’re at a disadvantage in a conversation.”
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is our one-stop-shop portal solution for content and collaboration. The search index within the portal includes over six million documents contained within our document management system. With Safari on the iPhone and our virtual private network (VPN) connection, attorneys can access and search our intellectual capital from anywhere in the world. They can even open, read and edit a document from the iPhone, something we’ve never been able to do on any other wireless device without major programming development. We had a recent success story of an attorney being onsite with a client, where he discovered he did not have the document and marketing materials he needed. With his iPhone, he pulled up the content from our portal and forwarded it to the client to review together.
Applications
Many vendors we currently do business with are extending their solutions to iPhone applications (e.g., DocsToGo). There is a surplus of both business applications and personal applications available for a user to download to the device. We have not released any applications that we directly support on the device (yet), but our iPhone adopters have been self-sufficient, and we have not encountered a situation of a user expecting IS support for an application they downloaded from the app store. There is something to be said for an attorney having one device for both business and entertainment, especially on extended travel assignments.
We have an investment in Citrix infrastructure both for remote access and regular daily business computing (seven thin client offices use Citrix as their platform for application access). The Citrix Receiver for iPhone is a free iPhone application that can be used to access any applications published to a user from our Citrix infrastructure. This can be especially useful for access to “noncore” applications, such as when a user is without a laptop and needs to get to information quickly. Examples of noncore applications include Concordance and CPI. If a user has that application published to them in Citrix, and has the receiver app on their iPhone, then he or she can get to that information over any connection – 3G on the road or WiFi in a hotspot.
Something interesting we are doing in this area relates to system administration. Our ultimate goal is to be able to administer the systems from Oak Street Beach over on Lake Michigan. All kidding aside, these tools have come in handy during nonbusiness hours when level three support is not close to a computer. One tool for specifically administering a Citrix infrastructure is called Extentrix, which allows us to monitor all users, sessions, servers and applications running on our Citrix XenApp server farm.
All operations can be done with one click on any of the toolbar’s buttons, including refresh, logoff or reset, which includes the ability to send a message to a specific session. There are virtual network computing (VNC) and remote desktop protocol (RDP) iPhone apps that will allow you to connect to a computer while you are away. We are starting to dig more into the area of custom scripts and applications published through Citrix for our IS administrators to use while away from a computer.
Procurement
The firm already standardized on AT&T as a single wireless carrier, therefore adding the device as an option was straightforward from a wireless service standpoint. That’s not to say we didn’t have any issues or confusion working with AT&T and Apple at the beginning, but because we wanted to make the iPhone available to our attorneys on the first day of the release, those were largely early adopter issues.
Currently, we support two options to purchase the iPhone and have it connected to Sonnenschein systems. The first option is to obtain the phone and service via the firm. With this approach, the firm coordinates all services. This option is referred to as a corporate responsible account (CRU). The second option is to obtain the phone and service through a personal AT&T Wireless account, known as an individual responsible account (IRU). With this approach, all services are coordinated between the individual, AT&T and Apple (though IRU users were able to get the firm discount on phones). We opened up the IRU option to reduce the risk to the firm of the two-year AT&T service contract on the iPhone.
In addition, we already had a mobility provisioning portal site, so simply adding the iPhone as a device selection for CRU users and integrating into our existing procurement process was easy.
Devices and Policies
The iPhone’s inherent coolness means there is the potential for an IS administrator or attorney to reach a higher level of social status with the device in their hands. However, despite this, you should still plan for a percentage of users to switch back to their old BlackBerry devices after a couple of weeks with an iPhone. Typically, this is due to the learning curve associated with the iPhone keyboard. Our response was simply “give it time.” Typing does get better and faster as you get used to the new keyboard and as the iPhone learns the words you use most often. However, due to the service restrictions, you should plan on either having a couple of training devices (with service plans attached to them) or have an IS person in each office switch to the iPhone and provide demonstrations and training sessions. The goal is to communicate to users that there is no switching back due to the service plan restrictions and that they should meet with an IS person who will demonstrate the device before making a commitment.
Have your policies in place and posted before you go live. This is important due to the iPhone’s two-year contract commitment with AT&T and the potential to run up expenses if you don’t have strict policies in place for upgrades, lost, stolen, damaged and malfunctioning devices.
We require iPhone users to sign a document stating they will reimburse the firm for any termination charges in the event of resignation from the firm or return of the device during the two-year iPhone contract period. We also added another category to the policy associated with IRU plans: “Sold or Trade-In Devices.” A 16 GB 3G iPhone was fetching a pretty good price on eBay when the 32 GB 3GS device came out, so for IRU customers who own their own device, you will want to have an additional policy to ensure IS is notified upon sale so the device can be properly wiped.
Exchange and System Integration
Starting with the 3.0 release of the iPhone, we felt it met our enterprise security needs. Passcode policy enforcement and settings (length, failed attempts) along with the ability to remote-wipe the device were critical to our use. We also use digital certificates to authenticate iPhone users against our corporate network, creating a highly secure VPN connection with access to our Portal and Citrix published applications. IS administrators have elevated rights in order to gain the remote system administration benefits.
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) was already enabled in our production Exchange environment for existing users with Windows Mobile phones. We were able to support a large number of iPhone devices at launch without any significant investment in deployment and administrative training by leveraging the existing production EAS – the investment and expertise was already in place.
EAS allows “push” e-mail, calendar and contacts to the iPhone as well as access to the Exchange global address list (GAL) directly from the device. Take notice that tasks, notes and “out of office” capabilities do not synchronize through EAS. However, there are a couple of free and for-purchase applications through the app store that allow those features. We’ve been testing and piloting an application called iMLite with users who need to have those features and need to have an iPhone. To add an additional layer of security, we deploy a profile to the iPhone with a certificate, which allows a user to establish a VPN connection and gain access to applications published through the Citrix receiver and to our SharePoint portal.
iTunes and Updates
iTunes is required to activate an iPhone with AT&T service, for syncing personal content and for ongoing software updates from Apple and AT&T. We decided not to install and support iTunes on firm-issued computers, since with iTunes comes personal photos, movies, music, etc. That means the firm would be paying for the storage of personal content, including an assumption that the content would make its way onto network shares, and the firm would be paying for support associated with that content (e.g., “How do I format the movie of my anniversary party so it syncs on the iPhone?”). A summary of our process associated with this policy is:
- An IRU user is off our books. Therefore, they do everything associated with the iPhone and AT&T activation from their personal computer (same steps as the second sub-bullet below).
- A CRU user can activate and support the iPhone in the following ways:
- Have IS do it. A computer with iTunes installed is deployed to the Service Desk and to each office in the firm for use by local IS staff. Initial AT&T and Apple activation is done through iTunes on one of those computers, a profile with a certificate is applied to the iPhone for connecting to Sonnenschein systems and Wi-Fi, and then the device is given to the user for them to connect to their personal computer for personal content syncing. A targeted IS update e-mail message is sent to iPhone users only when an iPhone software update is necessary and has been validated on IS owned iPhones. You will want to track who uses an iPhone because you will have BlackBerry users tell you they don’t care for the iPhone e-mail updates. If possible, only send these to iPhone users. Users can bring the iPhone into the office to have IS staff perform the update.
- User executes the initial AT&T and Apple activation on their own from their personal computer. They get instructions and a certificate from IS to perform the configuration to the iPhone on their own (typically this is either a remote or technically savvy user). They also take responsibility for updating the iPhone on their own when IS announces an update.
While we are on the subject of updates, understand that Apple’s culture leans toward consumer computing and not corporate. Their culture is not to provide technology roadmap information, not to provide release dates for updates of known issues and not to provide additional detail on specific bugs or even fixes when an update is released. That’s just part of deciding to deploy the iPhone. Understand it up front as part of your decision to use and support the device.
What’s Next
We are digging deeper into leveraging the Citrix receiver for the iPhone to develop our own client-side applications to publish to users. Our existing software vendors are working on, or we are pushing them to work on, applications that could be directly available on the iPhone as well. We are working with XenDesktop as the next release of our thin client solution using Citrix. The Citrix receiver for the iPhone will allow users to use their Sonnenschein corporate desktop (XenDesktop) from the iPhone, Mac or PC. Finally, this is also the first device that blends the personal computing experience with corporate. Following the logic with the IRU procurement policy, there is the potential to allow a user to purchase the type of computer they like best and leverage our XenDesktop solution while in the office. But that’s a topic for another article.
By the way, I am writing the closing to this article in Word 2007 published through the Citrix App receiver on my iPhone while I ride the train. I wouldn’t want to author an entire document on the device, but having the full fidelity of Word 2007 to proofread the document while on the train sure is nice. Maybe I will watch a movie next.
This article was first published in ILTA’s December 2009 issue of Peer to Peer titled “Wireless Devices” and is reprinted here with permission. For more information about ILTA, visit their website at www.iltanet.org.
A big thanks to Chris Lewis for allowing the republication of this great article on iPhone J.D.
As Ramu Nagappan of Macworld reports, Apple recently updated the MobileMe website so that when viewed on an iPhone, you can do a little more with it. Most notably, you can now access the Find my iPhone feature so if you lose your iPhone, you can find a friend with an iPhone and track down yours using theirs.
Even if AT&T is getting better in your city, it might not work that well in your house. If you have Internet access, a solution could be the AT&T MicroCell, a product I last mentioned in September of 2009 when it was only available in Charlotte, NC. According to Electronista, the product is soon coming to Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, San Diego and Las Vegas.
AppleInsider reports that TomTom owes a good bit of its profit this quarter to its very successful iPhone navigation app. Click here for TomTom U.S. & Canada ($79.99): 
