The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is a peer networking organization for people who work in the legal technology field, such as the people who work in law firm IT departments. I know that the folks in my law firm's tech department frequently take advantage of ILTA resources when seeking advice on selecting and working with software designed for the legal market and when recruiting new hires. Last week, ILTA had its annual conference in Nashville, TN, and as the conference started, ILTA and InsideLegal released the results of their sixth annual technology purchasing survey. JoAnna Forshee of InsideLegal explained the methodology of the survey as follows:
The 33 question web-based survey was distributed to approximately 684 law firms, ranging from 50 to 3,000 attorneys, and yielded 118 unique firm responses. 84% of all participating firms came from the U.S., with the remaining 16% originating from Canada, the UK, Australia, and Brazil. 85% of all survey respondents are IT Directors or C-Level executives, and 86% have direct purchasing or purchasing committee responsibility.
You can download a PDF of the survey results here, and it is full of interesting statistics, but for me the most interesting part of the survey was that, for the first time ever, tablets were a major topic of discussion for survey participants. When asked to name the most exciting technology or trend, the #1 answer in this year's survey was tablets. And as we know, when people say "tablets" they are really just saying "iPads" considering that around 90% of tablet purchases by lawyers are iPads. Thus, while the survey speaks of "tablets," I'll just use the word "iPad" for the rest of this post.
The survey reveals that most firms (55%) let lawyers buy their own iPads but the IT departments at the firms support the purchase. This is the way that it works at my law firm; the lawyer purchases an iPad, and our tech folks help the lawyer get it connected our Microsoft Exchange system and give some advice on apps. The survey reveals that 11% of firms purchase iPads for their attorneys — 9% purchase them on a case-by-case basis, and 2% purchase them for all attorneys in the firm (similar to the Bassford Remele firm that I wrote about a few weeks ago). Around a third of the law firms don't provide any support for iPads, although I suspect that those firms still have many lawyers using iPads on their own initiative, regardless of whether they are getting official support from their IT department. The survey includes this chart showing these responses:
Source: ILTA/InsideLegal Technology Purchasing Survey 2011 p. 12.
About 25% of survey respondents said that iPads were one of the major technology purchases of their law firm over the last 12 months. (I don't quite understand how that answer jives with only 11% of law firms purchasing iPads for attorneys; I guess they are counting both purchases by the firm and purchases by attorneys.) Similarly, about 25% of respondents said that the iPad would be one of the major technology purchases for the next 12 months.
You don't really need numbers like this to know that iPads are taking over law firms; just poke your head into most any law firm and the iPads are everywhere. But it was interesting to see iPads show up for the first time in thie year's ILTA survey, and it will be even more interesting to see how this year's numbers compare to what we will see in next year's survey.
