Every year, the American Lawyer ranks the top 200 law firms based on revenue, a list called the Am Law 200. Firms on the list include megafirms with thousands of lawyers such as Skadden, Baker & McKenzie, Latham & Watkins and Jones Day, relatively smaller firms with very high profits per partner such as Wachtell and Cravath, and successful regional law firms such as Lewis and Roca and my firm, Adams and Reese.
The American Lawyer conducts a technology survey of those firms every year. In the 2008 survey, only 5% of the firms reported having attorneys using an iPhone. In 2009, that number jumped to 55%, leading me to report (back when iPhone J.D. was not even one year old yet) that “Over half of the most profitable law firms use iPhones.” In 2010, that number rose to 77%. This year’s results came out this week, and the new number is … drum-roll please! … 96%! In other words, virtually every one of the most profitable law firms in the United States now lets their attorneys use iPhones. Alan Cohen of The American Lawyer explains:
For yet another year, 100 percent of the firms surveyed support BlackBerry devices. But that number is starting to warrant a Roger Maris–like asterisk, as the number of lawyers actually using BlackBerrys continues to slide. An eye-popping 96 percent of survey respondents report users on iOS, the platform that powers both Apple’s iPhone and its iPad. That’s up from 77 percent in 2010. And 67 percent of firms count Android users among their ranks, up from 43 percent last year.
I think it is now safe to say that if you are an attorney and you want to use an iPhone, your firm should let you do so.
Profitable law firms love iPads too
This year’s survey also includes some information on iPads. Only 7% of the surveyed law firms provide tablets to their attorneys, but 99% support the iPad, versus 25% for Android tablets and 10% for the BlackBerry tablet.
Not exactly on topic but I can’t resist.
The Maris asterisk is an urban legend– it doesn’t exist, and Maris was very unfairly maligned in his day. If that deserves one, then ever single season (and perhaps career) record set since the number of games expanded deserves one.
As a legal recruiter I own an Iphone and can appreciate why top lawyers have made it their custom and practice to carry Iphones: It’s The Browser and the User Friendly platform.
Jeff, This is eye opening and could not be better data for us, thank you. We are also seeing a rapid decline of BlackBerry devices. In the last 4 months I have not had one firm ask if our timekeeping app ” iTImeKeep” has a BB component. We do get asked if it works with the Droid but when I ask how many Droid devices are in the firm the number turns out to be insignificant.
I am an attorney considering converting from blackberry to iphone 4S for work. I have read about all the advanced features of the iphone 4S and all the apps and was about to make the jump, but then I realized that there appears to be a basic email functionality that is lacking — the Mail app does not allow a reply or reply all email to provide the full header information of the email to which I am replying in the body of the email even though it does permit this on an email forward — the To:, CC; and subject of the message is missing. The header is only the following:
“On Nov 21, 2011, at 11:21 AM, XYZ, ABC wrote:”…
WHY can’t I customize so I get the following information as I do if I forwarded:
“From: XYZ, ABC
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2011 11:21 AM
To: ZZZ, XXX
Cc: YYY, SSS
Subject: Re: Marketing report”
I asked some iphone users at work and they have been tolerating this problem in their emails and when I called Apple — applecare — they said there is no way to change preferences. Am I missing something? Are attorneys tolerating this with email strings not adequating memorializing emails in the string? Are they finding some code on the web to fix this? Is there an app that fixes this? I know there is a manual workaround to forward and then manually insert Re instead of Fw in the header and manually insert recipients in the To and cc, but this is not efficient.
[Jeff responds: I’ve never paid much attention to this before, but you are correct.]