The iPad lawyer

Just before Apple announced the iPad I blogged about whether it could help drive the move towards the paperless office for lawyers.

My very own iPad arrived by UPS yesterday so that I can finally put my speculation to the test and see just how useful the device is for a practising lawyer.

The iPad user experience has been reviewed to death already so I will be focussing more on how it performs for me as a lawyer. Nicki Black has blogged about this from a US perspective on Legal iPad (including an excellent collection of legal iPad links) so it will be interesting to see how enthusiastically UK lawyers adopt the device.

I am going to blog about specific apps and functions of the iPad in more detail as they become relevant, but this first post is a quick run through of the basic apps I have used over the last 24 hours.

Document review

In my original post I suggested that iPad would

"allow documents to be reviewed and annotated in much the same way as hard copy..."

and my first impressions are that this is one of the iPad's killer features. I have already downloaded  iAnnotate PDF which lets you view any PDF document and annotate it.

The options include highlighting text, underlining and strikeout, adding comments and freehand scribbling... all of which can then be saved in the PDF document and shared in a variety of ways.

I haven't used this in anger yet, but it makes it very easy to review and annotate documents on the iPad's large screen. I can certainly see myself marking up documents in this way rather than using a hard copy.

For viewing documents I have also installed Goodreader which essentially does what it says on the tin: allows you to read PDF, Word and all kinds of other documents quickly and easily on the iPad. For reviewing documents which don't need to be annotated this is a great solution.

I was a bit concerned about actually getting the documents onto the iPad in the first place having read some negative reviews about this.

Personally I haven't had any problem with this at all (although this may be a benefit of the delayed UK launch as the document transfer functions seem to have been improved since the iPad was first launched).

Transferring documents to the iPad via iTunes seems to work well (although it could be annoying with large quantities of documents).

However, I have also installed the excellent DropBox application which allows you to work with any files which are saved in your Drop Box from the iPad. Drop Box (and many other iPad applications) also has an "open with" function so that you can use any App with the relevant functionality (such as Pages or iAnnotate) to open documents saved in your Drop Box.

Saving documents back to your DropBox once you have worked on them seems to be more difficult and in practice I have been limited to sending them via email or transferring back to the desktop with iTunes. Hopefully this will be sorted out in later versions of the iPad OS.

Keynote / Powerpoint presentations

I have seen some scathing reviews of the iPad version of Keynote, which worried me a bit as it struck me as the perfect device to carry with you when presenting.

The slideshows I use are generally pretty basic (images and a line of text) and my experience so far has been really positive without any of the problems noted in the reviews.

I transferred a couple of recent slideshows in Powerpoint to the iPad using iTunes and fired up Keynote expecting all kinds of bad things to happen... but they seemed perfect. I don't know how it would work if you use the more advanced features like transitions and animation.

I shelled out for the dock to VGA connector when I ordered the iPad so I am looking forward to trying this out next time I give a talk.

I am really impressed with this aspect and I expect to see a lot of people presenting with iPads in the future... I just need to work out how to use my iPhone as a remote control!

Word Processing

Flushed with success from my Keynote experiment I paid my £5.99 to download Pages from the app store.

The legal world is pretty much driven by Microsoft Word. Almost by definition the life of a lawyer involves a lot of big Word documents with multi-level numbering, formatting driven by styles, cross-references and the like.

I have never been a huge fan of even the desktop version of Pages for working on legal documents (this is one area where I think Microsoft really do rule) as I always seem to lose some formatting or numbering.

Unfortunately, my experiments with the iPad version suggests that it is totally useless for working on legal documents.

Multi-level numbering, styles, tables of contents, fonts, cross-referencing and all manner of other things are stripped out when the document is loaded... leaving something that can only be described as a dog's breakfast.

I wasn't expecting a full featured version of MS Word, but even basic documents and letters imported from the office system into Pages turned into garbage.

I can't find any alternative app which will allow you to work on these kind of complex documents on the iPad and export them back to Word. Disappointingly, it seems that actually

"there isn't an App for that"

There may be a third party solution, but for the moment it seems that unless Microsoft decide to produce an iPad version of MS Office then word processing legal documents may remain a job for the laptop.

So, first impressions are that the iPad has a lot of potential as a tool for lawyers. A decent word processing app capable of handling legal documents would probably mean that you could leave the laptop at home... but for the moment that seems to be the main gap in the iPad's offering.

I am off down to London on Tuesday so I will be checking out how the iPad performs as a laptop substitute when travelling...