Portrait of a lawyer against the background of technological progress

The American Bar Association (American Bar Association) studied which gadgets and software are popular among lawyers, and also found out the level of security of documents stored on their computers. The results for 2012 were published as part of the annual Legal Technology Survey study.



In total, the authors received 5,076 responses from specialists working in various fields of law. All the data obtained were divided into six large blocks:

• basic technical devices required for operation;
• technologies used in legal departments and departments;
• technical devices used in the courtroom and in preparation for the process;
• network technologies and technologies used for communication;
• online research and data collection;
• "Mobile lawyer".

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In addition, the authors sorted the information received depending on the size of the law firm where one respondent works, starting with private lawyers working individually and ending with corporate lawyers and partners from the largest law firms with a solid staff. And got quite curious results.



For example, in companies with 500 or more people:

• 14.7% of all respondents at least once tried this or that form of cloud computing;
• 11.8% reported that they did not archive the data contained on their computer, and 58.9% said that the support service was making a backup, but how exactly they did not know;
• 27.9% never received electronic requests for the provision of court documents, while 23.5% faced such requests 3 times a month on average;
• 9.3% said that their computer would be hacked once, but 72.1% did not know for sure;
• 4.2% hired at least once due to their activity on blogs and social networks.
• As for firms with a staff of 100 to 499 people, here the trend is generally the same:
• 8% used cloud computing;
• 4.2% do not archive information, and 65.3% - archive, but do not know the technical details of this process;
• 30.6% never received online requests, and 15.3% received them up to three times a month;
• 9.6% experienced computer hacking, and 63.5% could not say for sure;
• 13.6% got the job with the help of Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

As for the gadgets that representatives of the legal profession choose to work with, Apple products are expectedly leading. Almost half of respondents use Apple iPhone for work. It is followed by popular BlackBerry business smartphones (they are chosen by 30.8%), devices on the Google Android platform (18.4%) and Microsoft Windows (a little more than 1% of respondents). At the same time, BlackBerry mobile products confidently hold the leading position among employees of large firms - 57% of respondents from law firms with a staff of more than 500 people voted in their favor.



Tablet computers are used by 33.1% of respondents, while 90% indicated Apple iPad as a model of the device.



86% choose Microsoft products as the operating system for their work computer: 43.8% use Windows 7, 36% use older, but still popular Windows XP. On Windows Vista, 5.1% of respondents “migrated”, just over 2% still do not part with Windows 2000, and 0.7% choose older Windows 98. At the same time, Apple's operating systems account for only 6%. 0.1% uses Linux - the shell favorite of programmers found no popularity in the legal environment. And another 1% of the respondents reported that something else was installed on their computers.



In terms of software, the main expenditures fall on sophisticated search programs, programs for reviewing documents and software for OCR - 35.3%, 27.3% and 20.2% of respondents, respectively, said that they spend money on such software. Another 22.2% buy special programs for working with PDF files.

Interestingly, about 1% of lawyers still connect to the Internet via dial-up technology.