The cover story on the April, 2013 issue of the ABA Journal is The Mobile Lawyer by New York journalist Joe Dysart. The article discusses how smartphones and tablets are changing the legal practice, and I was pleased to provide Dysart some information for the article. The magazine includes a section describing top iOS apps (my picks) and Android apps (Jeff Taylor‘s picks), which you can see online too. Note that I gave Dysart my list of apps way back in November of 2012. (The lead time for magazine articles is quite long.) I still like and use all of those apps, but today I probably would have mentioned Apple’s Pages app in addition to Documents to Go. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
- Dallas attorney Tom Mighell, author of several other books for lawyers using iPads (like this one) wrote a new book called iPad in One Hour for Litigators full of tips for using an iPad in a courtroom. I haven’t seen it yet, but I look forward to learning more about it when I see Tom at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago in a few days.
- Over four years ago, I linked to a funny iPhone-related video by D.C. attorney Tom Goldstein, founder of SCOTUSblog. I use SCOTUSblog in my practice when I have cases go up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is my favorite source for Supreme Court information when there are hot cases before the Court — which obviously includes this past week, when SCOTUSblog has had fantastic coverage of the two same-sex marriage cases. This week, SCOTUSblog received a Peabody Award, and is the first blog to ever get the recognition. What a well-deserved honor. Congrats to Goldstein and the rest of the crew.
- Alan Cohen of Law Technology News asks Is the Apple iPad Mini Ready for Business? Spoiler alert: YES.
- Jim Calloway of the Oklahoma Bar Association wrote ar article for the Oklahoma Bar Journal (available here in PDF format) about using an iPad in your law practice.
- New York attorney Niki Black discusses how lawyers use mobile devices to manage their law practices and put together an infographic to display the statistics.
- During Hurricane Katrina, my law firm
and a few others in New Orleans used satellite phones to communicate
when the cell towers were not working or overloaded. I see that Thuraya
now sells the SatSleve,
a device that fits around an iPhone to turn it into a satellite phone.
If you travel to remote locations, I could see it being quite useful. - ExhibitView, an app that you can use to present evidence at trial or in a meeting, was recently updated to version 4.0. New features include better callout graphics and the ability to maintain documents in full size even while they are being projected. Click here for ExhibitView ($49.99):
- Caitlin Moon of Litig8r Tech discusses MobiLit for iPad, another app that can be used to display documents.
- This week, T-Mobile announced that it is (finally) about to start selling the iPhone, so you can now get the iPhone from all of the major U.S. carriers. T-Mobile has an interesting approach to the iPhone 5. You pay $99 up front, then pay $20 a month for 24 months, but you have no contract so you can cancel at any time if you pay off the phone. I’ve seen some other folks do the math (such as Steve Kovach of Business Insider) and conclude that because of T-Mobile cheaper monthly plans, this works out to be the overall cheapest way to get an iPhone 5. T-Mobile 4G LTE is new so it is available in far fewer markets than Verizon or AT&T, but T-Mobile does have a 3G network that is up to twice as fast as the one that AT&T has (in fact, T-Mobile calls its faster 3G “4G,” a tactic that AT&T also uses, but in my mind you need to be LTE to be “real” 4G), and the iPhone 5 will be modified to take advantage of T-Mobile’s faster 3G network. (Dan Moren of Macworld has the details on this.) Depending upon where you live, T-Mobile might be the best carrier, and for many people they are the cheapest carrier, so I’m glad to see that they will start selling the iPhone this month.
- Brian Stelter of the New York Times writes about Nick D’Aloisio, a British teenager who write a news app called Summly when he was 15 years old and now, two years later, sold it to Yahoo! for tens of millions of dollars. Gulp.
- If you are thinking about getting one of those tiny pico projectors, perhaps to display a presentation from your iPhone or iPad, Geoff Morrison of The Wirecutter picks the best model.
- And finally, a British beer company, Somersby Cider, created a funny commercial that parodies an Apple Store opening. Worth watching: