Josh Adams is an immigration attorney in San Francisco. Before he went to law school, he was a software developer, so he knows a thing or two about computers. As a practicing attorney, he was frustrated with existing methods for accessing resources used by immigration lawyers. Books are heavy to carry around, and websites can be difficult to use when you are on-the-go and don’t let you easily jump to specific parts of the statutes. Thus, he decided to make an app. He took advantage of Apple’s free iTunes U to take a Stanford class on making iOS apps, he created the code for his own iPhone app, he hired a graphic designer to help him create some icons, and the result is the new Immigration app. The app costs $24.99 and contains the text of the Immigration & Nationality Act and 8th Code of Federal Regulations, presented in a way that makes it easy to search each individual subsection of the INA and CFR, jump between corresponding sections of the INA and CFR, and bookmark specific subsections — all in an app that works even if you don’t have Internet access.
There are five buttons at the bottom of the screen that you use to navigate the app. The first button, INA, contains the text of the INA. Slide your finger up and down the left side of the screen to scroll through sections. When you find the section you want, tap the plus icon to see the subsections. The window containing the text of each subsection stays the same size, so to see all of the text, you slide your finger up and down in the middle of the screen. With the default text size, you can see about 3.5 lines of text at a time.
This is the first time that I have seen an app that doesn’t display all of the text of a subsection of a statute at once, and to be honest, at first I had serious reservations about the need to scroll up and down just to see all of the words. However, after playing around with the app for a while, the approach does grow on me a little. One advantage is that it is very easy to see where a particular subsection lives in the context of the statute as a whole. In other words, it helps you to see both the forest and the trees at the same time. Having said that, sometimes you just want to see all of the words, and Josh tells me that in the upcoming version 1.1 of the app, you can long press on any subsection to cause that subsection to come up in a full screen scrollable window of its own. He showed me a video of how it will work, and I like it.
If you tap on the text of a subsection, a menu lets you copy the text in that subsection, create a bookmark for that subsection, or jump directly to the corresponding section of the CFR. Jumping to the CFR brings you to the second area of the app, which works the same as the first area but which contains the CFR instead of the INA.
If you want to search the INA and CFR, use the search box at the top of the screen. The app will then take you through each subsection in which the word is found, with large arrows at the top to navigate through search results. The individual search term is not highlighted in the subsection so you just need to scroll up and down until you find your search term in the text.
Tap the Settings button and you can change the font size. You can also turn on Dynamic Type, which is helpful if you previously established a default preference for the text size in apps, a process that I discussed in this post from last October. You can also turn sounds on and off in the app.
The above screenshots show the app running on an iPhone 5s, but this is a universal app so it will also work on your iPad.
I think it is a great idea for attorneys to have an iPhone/iPad app that contains the text of the law that is important to your practice. As a litigator, I frequently use apps that contain the text of applicable rules of civil procedure, both when I am in court and when I am working at my desk. This Immigration app is a perfect example of the type of app that I consider so useful. My only reservation about this app was the use of fixed-size windows for displaing text, and as noted above, this will be addressed in an upcoming update. I particularly like how easy it is to jump back and forth from the INA to the CFR. If you are an immigration attorney, I suspect that you would find this app to be quite useful in your law practice. Kudos to Josh Adams for seeing a need, learning how to address it, and then coming up with a solution — a workflow utilized by good lawyers every day.
Click here to get Immigration ($24.99):