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. ILTA just concluded its annual conference in Las Vegas, and at the conference, ILTA and InsideLegal released the results of their tenth annual technology purchasing survey. The survey was sent to almost 1,300 ILTA member law firms with responses from 184 law firms, about 83% of which were U.S. firms. You can download this year's report in PDF format here. Here is what I saw in the survey results that struck me as interesting for attorneys who use iPhones and iPads.
iPhones, iPads and the Apple Watch are exciting to IT departments
Every year, ILTA asks respondents to identify the most exciting technology or trend — an open ended question. Two of the top seven answers in 2015 relate to iOS: mobility (use of tablets as desktop replacements; mobile device management; virtual mobile computing; ability for attorneys to connect remotely and perform work without issues) and the Apple Watch. The other five exciting tech or trends were cloud computing, security, virtualization, artificial intelligence, and big data.
For law firms that buy smartphones, 91% buy iPhones
This is a "technology purchasing survey" which means it asks about technology purchased by law firms. There are many categories of legal technology that are virtually always purchased by law firms and not individual lawyers, but the category of mobile technology is one that is moving away from IT purchasing departments. Many attorneys now buy their own device, a practice so prevalent in all companies that there is a common acronym for it: BYOD (bring your own device).
The ILTA survey asks about BYOD, and there has been a move towards BYOD since 2012 although it decreased somewhat this year. In 2012, 10% of firms were BYOD. That increased in 21% in 2013, then to 36% in 2014. This year the number dropped to 32%. This was somewhat surprising to me as I would have expected to see even more BYOD in 2015 among ILTA firms.
The ILTA survey also reveals that 62% of law firms have BYOD policies. I think that it is helpful for a firm to have such a policy, especially for larger law firms. (Of the 28% of law firms that reported not having BYOD policies, 53% were from smaller firms of 1-49 attorneys.)
The ILTA survey does not ask any questions about smartphones that attorneys purchase themselves (the BYOD smartphones), only the smartphones that law firms are buying. If 32% of law firms are BYOD in 2015, that means that around 68% are buying smartphones for at least some of their attorneys. What are they buying? Almost all are buying iPhones (62%), most are buying Android (43%), almost half are still buying BlackBerries (26%), and some are buying Windows smartphones (15%). Or stated differently, for those law firms that purchase smartphones for their attorneys in 2015, 91% are buying iPhones, 63% are buying Android, 38% are buying BlackBerry and 22% are buying Windows.
Here is what the last four years of survey data looks like:
What this chart doesn't tell you is how many of each smartphone the firms are buying, just that the firm is buying at least one of that brand. On the other hand, the chart does tell us something about which smartphones are acceptable to IT departments at law firms. Back in 2012, half of the law firms were not buying iPhones, and now almost all of them buy iPhones. In 2012, very few law firms would buy any Android smartphones, and now almost two-thirds of them will do so. And while other surveys, such as the latest ABA Technology Survey that I analyzed last month, indicate that attorney BlackBerry use has plummeted over the last few years (only 5% in 2015), over a third of law firms still buy a BlackBerry for at least some of their attorneys. Sure, that is a downward trend, but it shows that BlackBerry still has a role for attorneys when it is the law firm buying the device instead of the attorney.
For law firms that buy tablets, the iPad remains popular
In the 2012 ILTA purchasing survey, only 13% of law firms purchased tablets for at least some of their attorneys. That increased substantially in the 2013 survey, when 58% of law firms purchased tablets for at least some of their attorneys. In 2014, the number dropped to 48%, but this year it is back up to 58%.
For those law firms that do purchase tablets for their attorneys, the iPad remains incredibly popular. In 2015, 81% of law firms that purchase tablets say that they purchase iPads. That's down somewhat from prior years; it was 92% in 2014 and almost 100% in 2013. For those law firms that do purchase tablets for their attorneys, Android and Microsoft Surface tablets are also popular; about 50% purchase Microsoft tablets in 2015, and about 24% purchase Android tablets.
For the last three years, ILTA has asked "What percentage of your firm's attorneys use tablets in their day-to-day work?" This year, the answer was 89%, compared to 91% in 2014 and 86% in 2013. I've always wondered about this question; does my IT department really know how many of us at my law firm are using iPads day-to-day? Having said that, it is good to know that IT departments understand that the tablet is an important tool for attorneys, and hopefully this knowledge encourages them to help their attorneys get even more value from their iPads.