A few weeks ago, Wolfram Alpha released a $5 app called Wolfram Lawyer's Professional Assistant. The app, which works on both the iPhone and iPad, allows you to make a series of complicated calculations that could be useful for attorneys. Wolfram Alpha provided me with a free review copy of this app, and not only is the app useful, but it reminds me of how useful Wolfram Alpha itself is. Before discussing what this specific app does, let me begin by discussing where this app came from.
Wolfram Alpha — Background
Almost three years ago, I wrote about the debut of the Wolfra Alpha website and explained the background as follows: "Since 1988, Wolfram Research has been selling Mathematica, a high-end computational software product that is used by scientists and mathematicians and sells for about $2,500. For the last five years, Stephen Wolfram and his team have been looking at using the complicated math that can be done with Mathematica to answer questions by computing connections based on existing data. A few days ago, this research culminated with the unveiling of the Wolfram|Alpha website."
I thought that the Wolfram Alpha website was interesting when it debuted in May of 2009 because it was a unique search engine, one that doesn't link to other sites to find answers to search terms (like Google does) but instead one that tries to compute an objective answer to a search query by accessing a vast database of information with the answer displayed using organized tables, graphs, charts and/or pictures. Here are some examples of what Wolfram Alpha can do:
- Enter "Easter 2012" and the site gives you not only the date (April 8, 2012) but also the number of days from today, other significant historical events on that date, and estimated sunrise and sunset for your city.
- Enter "New Orleans airport" and the site gives you the official name (Louis Armstrong International Airpot), the FAA code (MSY), the location and elevation of the airport, the number of runways, flights currently leaving from and arriving at MSY, and other nearby airports
- Enter a food item and get nutritional information
- Enter a disease and get lots of factual information such as the number of patients diagnosed with the disease each year
- Enter a university to get addresses, enrollment, tuition, number of degrees awarded by field, etc.
Wolfram Alpha is simply a huge collection of knowledge, especially knowledge with some numerical component.
Wolfram Alpha on the iPhone
When Wolfram Alpha debuted in 2009, I was happy to see that there was an iPhone-friendly version of the website that looked great on the small screen. But then in later in 2009, Wolfam Alpha decided to remove its iPhone-formatted website and instead encourage people to pay $50 for its iPhone app. The move was not popular, and in April of 2010, the company dropped the price of the app to only $2 and offered refunds to people who had paid $50 — a practice that I had not seen before and I don't remember having seen since. The company also brought back the iPhone-formatted version of the website and made the $2 version of the app work on both the iPhone and iPad. Somewhere along the way, the price of the app increased to $3.
Even though you can now access Wolfram Alpha for free on an iPhone using Safari or at a small cost with the $3 app, there is so much information available on Wolfram Alpha that often you don't even know what is there that you might find useful. As a result, Wolfram Alpha has released dozens of iPhone apps that focus on, and provide simplified access to, a subset of the universe of knowledge available on the website. Apps cover topics such as statistics, flight information, physics, U.S. Presidents, music theory, personal finance, and genealogy.
Wolfram Lawyer's Professional Assistant
And this brings us to the legal app that came out a few weeks ago, Wolfram Lawyer's Professional Assistant. The app provides a simplified interface to lots of information that a lawyer might find useful.
Some of the calculations and information that this app provides include
- Statutes of limitations in different states
- Roman numeral conversion
- Date calculations (all calendar days or just business days)
- Settlement calculators
- Historical value of money. (I see that $1 today is equivalent to $0.16 when I was born in 1969.)
- Interest rates
- Tax rates
- Historical weather on specific dates in specific cities
- Blood alcohol calculator
- Demographics in cities or congressional districts
- Occupational salaries
- Cost of living comparisons between cities
- Family relations computations (e.g. my mother's cousin's son is my second cousin)
- Unit conversion
- Closing cost estimation
- Currency conversion
- Time zone conversion
Not every aspect of the app is perfect. For example, although this app can perform date calculations, the interface is better on a focused app like DaysFrom. This app includes a legal dictionary, but so few terms are included that I doubt most attorneys would consider it very useful, and it is certainly no competition for the other legal dictionary apps in the App Store. On the other hand, most calculations are done very well, and the amount of information you get from your search terms can be simply amazing.
The app runs on the iPad as well as the iPhone, and the iPad interface is very nice. You see search fields on the left and search results on the right. Considering the large amount of information that Wolfram Alpha provides when you run a search, it is nice to have a larger screen to see more of it at once.
Is the app worth $5? One might say no considering that all of this information is available on the free Wolfram Alpha website itself or the $3 app that provides an iPhone interface to the website. If you have an iPhone 4S and use Siri, Siri often uses Wolfram Alpha to provide answers to questions. Indeed, you can even instruct Siri to search Wolfram Alpha just by saying "Wofram" before your other words. For example, you can ask Siri "Wolfram weather in New York on January 2, 2000" and you will get lots of information from Wolfram Alpha, including the high of 54º and the low of 38º on that day.
On the other hand, the Wolfram Lawyer's Professional Assistant app includes specific fields that can make it easier to formulate a query. Moreover, as much as I've used the Wolfram Alpha website before, it never even occurred to me that the website could make some of the computations listed in this app, so just seeing the menu items is helpful as a reminder of what Wolfram Alpha can do.
I strongly recommend that every iPhone-using attorney be aware of what Wolfram Alpha is so that you can remember it when it might be useful. Whether you use the website in Safari, Siri, the $3 app, or this new Lawyer's Professional Assistant, you can tap into an incredible database of knowledge.
Click here for Wolfram Lawyer's Professional Assistant ($4.99):