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 recently held its annual conference in the Washington D.C. area, and at the conference, ILTA and InsideLegal released the results of their eleventh annual technology purchasing survey. The survey was sent to almost 1,231 ILTA member law firms with responses from 175 law firms, about 83% of which were U.S. firms. I previously wrote about the reports released in 2015, 2014 and 2013. Here is what I saw in the 2016 survey results that struck me as interesting for attorneys who use iPhones and iPads.
For law firms that buy smartphones, 94% 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 for smartphones. Back in 2012, 90% of responding law firms were buying smartphones for their own attorneys with only 10% being totally BYOD. In 2013, 21% had a BYOD approach to smartphones. This increased to 36% in 2014, and in 2015 and 2016 it was 32%. Having said that, my suspicion is that some of these firms who do purchase smartphones for their attorneys are not purchasing them for every attorney; they could be just purchasing them for a subset such as new associates.
The ILTA survey also reveals that 68% of law firms have a formal BYOD policy that covers smartphones. For the 30% of law firms that have no BYOD policy at all, most of them — 60% — are smaller law firms with 1 to 49 attorneys.
This 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 completely BYOD in 2016, that means that around 68% are buying smartphones for at least some of their attorneys. What are they buying? Almost all of the 68% are buying iPhones (64%), about half are buying Android (33%), only 18% are still buying BlackBerries, and 10% are buying Windows smartphones. Or stated differently, for those law firms that purchase smartphones for their attorneys in 2016, 94% are buying iPhones, 49% are buying Android, 26% are buying Blackberry and 15% are buying Windows.
Here is what the last five 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/platform. 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; Android peaked at 63% in 2015 and is down to 49% this year. And while BlackBerry was the most popular smartphone purchased by law firms back in 2012, that popularity has decreased substantially in recent years. Indeed, while the 26% number reflected on the above chart is a five-year low for BlackBerry, I'm actually surprised it was still that high. For example, in 2015 the ABA reported that only 5% of lawyers were still using a BlackBerry device. (The ABA has not yet released its 2016 numbers.)
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. Since then, the number has gone up and down but has always stayed fairly close to 50%. In 2014, 48% of law firms purchased tablets; in 2015, 58% of law firms purchased tablets; in 2016, 52% of law firms purchased tablets.
For the approximately half of all responding law firms who were purchasing tablets, the iPad remains popular, although that popularity has been decreasing somewhat. In 2013, almost 100% of law firms purchasing tablets were buying iPads. That fell to 92% in 2014, 81% in 2015, and this year it is down to 73%. For those law firms that do purchase tablets for their attorneys, about 50% purchase Microsoft tablets, which is consistent with 2015. But only about 10% purchased Android tablets in 2016, down from 24% in 2015.
But again, remember that these numbers only reflect law firm tablet purchases. Most attorneys who I know purchase their own tablets.
