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One district attorney's journey to iPad happiness
Let's face it. Apple and the legal profession have not always enjoyed a terribly close relationship. Since the advent of the word processor, being a lawyer practically required a PC. Lawyers' slavish dedication to Corel's Word Perfect, long after everybody else had stopped using it, is the stuff of legend. Database management programs were typically proprietary things, all requiring networks of PCs. Using a Mac in this environment required, at best, many workarounds, and, at worst, a separate PC to access various schedulers, run conflict checks and access documents. Recently, e-filing and the need to share and trade digital documents allowed for greater platform-independence. Macs, iPhones and now iPads claim their share of diehard legal adherents; you can get stories from the front lines of Apple integration in law from sites like The Mac Lawyer, MacAttorney, EsquireMac, the Disability Law Blog and the MacLaw mailing list. The legal world's growing acceptance of Apple means that lawyers like Ron Elkins can get their Apple mojo working. Ron, the District Attorney for Wise County and City of Norton, in Wise, VA, has shared the ways in which the iPad has integrated itself perfectly into his criminal practice. Ron not only accesses documents (PDFs and audio files) through Safari, but conducts presentations with Keynote, dictates with Dragon Dictation, and accesses files through DropBox and GoodReader -- all through his iPad. Here's hoping that Apple continues to make inroads into the legal community. It's been lonely. [via The Mac Lawyer]
