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Lawyers and mobile technology: 2015 ABA survey
RICHARD WEINER
Special to the Legal News
Published: April 22, 2016
The 2015 American Bar Association legal technology survey covered a lot of ground, and we are going to cover some of that survey.
This week’s column will go over some results from the mobile computing segment of that survey.
One interesting fact from the survey was that the questions were answered by an older collective than had been responding to the survey in prior years. Most of the respondents were between 50-70 years old. There was no real accounting for this. It may look like lawyers are skewing older altogether, as fewer enter the market. Who knows?
This likely accounts for the fact that it looks as if mobile technology has penetrated this market less than one might expect.
For instance, only 90 percent of lawyers surveyed have smartphones. I literally don’t know anybody who does not own a smartphone, and I’m old enough to collect Social Security.
About 80 percent of lawyers use laptops, and about half have tablets.
The most common use of mobile technology is emailing (93 percent). Seven percent of attorneys don’t use email (! Weird, but there you are again).
Breaking down how lawyers use mobile technology by type of device is interesting. While more than 80 percent create documents on a laptop, less than 20 percent create docs on a phone.
Contrarily, 45 percent use a laptop for mapping, while nearly three-quarters use a phone for that function. Lawyers use smartphones far less frequently for other functions: presentation (9 percent); web conferencing (10 percent, although most lawyers apparently don’t web conference at all); and time and billing (17 percent).
Apple products still dominate the mobile market for lawyers, even though the desktop market is still dominated by the PC. I will never understand that. Seventy percent of attorneys surveyed carry iPhones, and about a quarter carry Android. The percentages are even higher in the tablet realm—more than 80 percent of attorneys carry an iPad.
Security—more than 90 percent of attorneys use passwords to protect their mobile devices. Good luck with that if that’s the only security you use. Far fewer than half use any other kind of security.
The top 10 mobile legal apps used by attorneys in 2015, in descending order, were Fastcase; WestlawNext; Legal Dictionary; Lexis Advance; TrialPad; LexisNexis Legal News; TranscriptPad; Courtlink: LexisNexis Get Cases & Shepardize; and HeinOnline.