The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/51267
In this new age of consumerization, law firms are expected to support devices of every size and brand. With lawyers and support staff utilizing mobile devices in their always- connected lives, it's only natural that there is an increasing demand for mobile access to work functions and applications. But when does a device become too small to feasibly perform work? Several ILTA members recently sat down at a virtual roundtable to share their views on this very topic. Each person's interview can be heard in its entirety on the accompanying podcasts. possible on small devices such as an iPhone, but it's certainly more appealing on ones with some size, such as an iPad or even a seven-inch tablet. David: Our firm allows the connection of some small phones and tablets, including BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and iPad devices. We're currently evaluating Windows Phone version 7. Ryan: I think the smallest device we allow to connect to the firm's network is the BlackBerry Pearl 9100. We don't have many, but that form factor reflects the desires of our users who want a very "pocket-able" device at the expense of screen size and keyboard input. Steven: I'm with everyone else; in terms of form factor, the smallest device we allow is a smartphone like iPhone, Droid or BlackBerry. Charlotte: If it is within our protected network, then we allow any device that has an identifiable MAC address. Outside of that, we allow any device that has a Citrix or Good Technology client. Justin: We don't have any size restrictions, and we encourage our professionals to let us know if they come across any device that they think would be a good fit, because the trend we're seeing is that users are becoming more sophisticated and practical about evaluating what's optimal for their needs. We've entered into this period where big is the new small, and people who have consistently moved toward increasingly smaller and more powerful devices are now looking at tablet PCs and iPads. Steven: Email messaging is the primary activity, and our users have remote access via published applications and the published desktop on their devices, as well as some reference and internal information portals. Justin: We have developed apps for workload distribution on the road, including access to financial reporting, expense reporting and other functions that tie into our intranet. One of the great things about the time entry app we use is that lawyers can get a reminder to bill a case whenever they end a call. Those hooks that tie standard functions into your important revenue-generating work tasks are important. What I really like about mobile application development is that you can quickly put together a mobile app without a significant investment of time or money and deliver it to someone who's been looking for something, such as an expense report application, and find out whether it's really going to be used before you scale it to a full-blown app for the desktop or laptop. Ryan: Email messaging and phone calls are still the most common tasks performed by our users. Other uses vary by work responsibility. Some people are creators of work product and need familiar methods for fast input and manipulation ( , a keyboard and mouse). Others are consumers of information and are more focused on reading, annotating and contributing to existing work product. We see more attachment viewing and editing from mobile devices today, but not much document creation yet. Charlotte: It's critical for our attorneys to have reliable accessibility to email messages from any device. Another important task is the ability to read attachments, particularly Word and PDF documents, from their devices. This is David: The primary uses we see are reading and responding to email messages and viewing calendars and attachments. Like Ryan, we've also recently started to see some use of tablets to edit documents on the go. Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 19 What is the smallest device that you allow to connect to your fir m ' s network? i.e. What ar lawyers can perfor e the most common work-r m when using a mobile device? elated tasks that