The 2011 Clio Apple in Law Firms Survey results have been tabulated and 763 people participated, 80% of which were practicing lawyers and 20% of which were law students or non-lawyers. Co-sponsored by MILOfest, this year’s results show that Apple products are going strong and gaining ground with small firm lawyers at the expense of previously dominant legal technology players, such as Research in Motion.
Seventy-six percent of respondents were lawyers at firms with 10 attorneys or less. Many of the survey respondents were relative Mac newcomers; 25.3% of respondents had switched to Mac within the past year.
Widely-used products in the survey included iPhones, used by 60.9% of respondents; Dropbox, used by 25% of respondents; iCloud, seeing high adoption at 15%; and Android phones with usage at 13%. Evernote, a note-taking app not included in last year’s survey, debuted at 14% usage. OpenOffice had gained 2 percentage points since last year, showing that open source technology is appealing to solo and small law firms. Clio showed a 22% adoption rate, more than double the 2010 adoption rate.
Why are lawyers continuing to “go Mac?” Approximately 46.5% of respondents said they chose Apple hardware over PC options because the technology was more reliable and secure. Usability was next on at 33.8%. Familiarity due to home use of Apple/Mac products was 9.8%, and aesthetics and design came in fourth at 3%.
About 76.5% of law students said that when they graduate, they plan on choosing a Mac platform for their office. This statistic shows that Mac has a bright future in legal, since the new generation graduating is heavily Apple-oriented.
“This is the second year Clio has conducted this Apple in Law Firms survey to benchmark the degree of adoption of Apple products and other emerging technology in the legal industry,” says Clio CEO and co-founder Jack Newton. “Apple hardware and devices — especially the iPad and iPhone — continue to capture the attention and dollars of lawyers, cloud-based applications have won attorneys’ confidence and gained more traction. With the majority of law students planning to use Mac apps in their law practices upon graduation, we can reasonably predict a longstanding trend toward continued expansion of Apple products within the legal industry.”
All legal professionals and law students were invited to participate in the survey, regardless of size and location. The survey aimed to determine to what extent lawyers and law students are now using Apple products, and whether there is clear evidence of an increasing trend of the legal industry “going Mac” in the future.
Clio (http://www.goclio.com/) is a cloud-based practice management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product and is specifically designed for solo practitioners and small law firms using PCs and Macs.