Law Practice Magazine is the publication from the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA. The magazine has always included good articles on legal technology. Indeed, the reason that I joined the section in the 1990s — back when I was an associate and had nothing to do with the management side of a law firm — was that the magazine included a column by attorney Erik J. Heels, one of the pioneers in the use of the Internet by lawyers. In 1992, Heels published an electronic and print book called The Legal List which compiled law-related resources on the Internet. You can now read the old editions of The Legal List on his website, and it is an interesting trip down technology memory lane, back in the days when “The Internet” meant GOPHER, FTP, WAIS and BBS.
Fast-forward to the present, and lawyers interested in the Internet and legal technology are gearing up for ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago later this month. The current edition of Law Practice Magazine includes tech tips from many of this year’s TECHSHOW speakers, including a short column I wrote
recommending a few iPhone apps for lawyers. It reflects a small portion of the “60 Apps in 60 Minutes” presentation that Reid Trautz and I are giving on March 25.
I also enjoyed reading the columns suggesting Blackberry apps by Toby Brown and
Dan Pinnington and Palm Pre apps by Erik Mazzone and Nerino Petro. (UPDATE 3/19/10: The print issue of the magazine also has recommended apps for the Motorola Droid running the Android OS by Rick Georges, but I don’t see that column is online.) Some of the apps suggested in those columns include:
- Documents to Go and other apps to view Word, Excel and PDF files
- Twitter clients
- Task managers
- Flight information apps
- Instant messaging clients
- Voice control apps such as Vlingo and Google Mobile
- Compilations of statutes and rules
- Internet radio apps such as Pandora
- GPS navigation apps
- Evernote
- Weather apps
- e-Book readers
In light of those two columns, if you are wondering what would happen if you had to use a smartphone other than the iPhone, apparently the answer is that while you would lose the elegance and power of the iPhone, the apps that you would be using would for the most part be very similar to the apps that you are using now with the iPhone. Interesting.
I’ll recommend two more good articles from the current issue of Law Practice Magazine: this
article by Nicole Garton-Jones with tips for lawyers who travel, and this one which collects a wide variety of legal technology tips from many different TECHSHOW presenters.