The iFuture
For the record, I don’t intend to buy one. At least, not for a few more years and not until the inevitable upgrades, improvements, fixes, and content distribution changes have run their course. But well before the iPad 3.o arrives, the original version will have had a serious impact on the computer industry, on the production and distribution of content, and yes, on the legal profession.
I won’t recap everything that’s been said about the iPad in the mainstream and legal communities — Reid Trautz and The Wired GC have two solid takes — but it’s worth noting that the reaction has been mixed (and not just to the name, which I think will fade to non-issue status in relatively short order). The iPad has been criticized for its failure to shift paradigms, to be the next big thing that the iPhone was. It’s just a small Netbook, or a big iPod Touch, say the critics: not a game-changer, not everything it could have been. So let’s start with a quick word about what the iPad does appear to be.
The iPad is a mobile content consumption device. It isn’t optimized to play music, record videos, create documents, take photos, make phone calls, or do any of the other functions whose absence has been criticized. I suspect that’s for two reasons. One, Apple already has a fleet of devices that do these things very well and has no interest in rendering them redundant or obsolete. And two, the convenient consumption of content is actually an extraordinarily deep and rich field that no one has, up until now, really set out to harvest. The iPad is optimized to allow its owner to access as much content as possible as easily as possible: it’s light enough to carry around with ease, equipped with a screen big enough to read with ease, and set up to access the internet with ease. That’s an immensely powerful functionality, because when people are able to get whatever they want easily and conveniently, it changes all their expectations and creates completely new standards of service and satisfaction.
That’s all well and good, you say. But does the arrival of the iPad mean anything for the legal services marketplace? I think that in three different ways, the answer to that question is yes.
1. Mobility. In the beginning, there was the briefcase. If a lawyer had to venture outside the cozy confines of his law office, he stuffed the relevant papers and books into a briefcase and set off (if he was heading to a trial or discovery, a junior would trundle after him pushing a mini-trolley stacked with boxes). Then came the laptop, which allowed the lawyer to carry not just the relevant files for his case, but also all the files in his office. And now has come the iPad, which will allow the lawyer to access everything he has ever produced in any location (through MobileMe or DropBox) and on the entire internet. Through each evolutionary stage, the lawyer can transport more and more information on ever-smaller and lighter items, until he gets to the point where he is essentially a walking law firm.
So I think the one trend that the iPad will really accelerate is the movement away from the physical plant of a law firm. Manufacturing still requires workers to come together in a centralized factory, but the same can’t be said of knowledge industries like law. There are fewer and fewer reasons for lawyers to come to work every day in the same facility — physical law libraries are dwindling, files and documents reside on servers or in clouds, and smartphones have untethered lawyers from offices and landlines. As hourly measures of productivity begin their long decline, “face time” at the firm will become less important. Collaboration, the benefit most often touted for lawyers’ proximity to each other and the key to future legal services, is and will be possible through multiple means, most of which involve distance. The iPad, along with its coming competitors and future iterations, has a good chance of being the watershed technological development that finally does away with “four walls and a door” as the default definition of a law office.
2. Publishing. As noted above, the iPad is designed for the consumption of content, not the creation of it. Lawyers create more content than the average professional and tend to consume somewhat less, but what they do consume is largely the work product of legal publishers: case law reports, legislative updates, legal research databases, leading texts, legal periodicals, and so forth, all constitute the heart and soul of legal publishing houses. The iPad is a mobile reader with internet access, and the obvious way in which lawyers will use this device is for these sorts of materials. This will fundamentally change the way in which legal publishers go about distributing their content, just as the iPad will change (and is already considered the only viable option to stop the collapse of) consumer newspapers and magazines.
The thing about legal information is that you need it when you need it, not when you can get back to the office or find a wi-fi spot for your laptop. Hence the appeal of legal research tools for mobile devices: just before the iPad premiered, FastCase generated a lot of buzz in the blawgosphere by announcing a free legal research app for the iPhone. But the iPhone, as even its adherents will admit, is too small to be used for extensive text review (and the BlackBerry even more so). The iPad promises to make legal information instantly accessible and convenient to read (there are those words again), and it won’t be long before lawyers start viewing mobile electronic access as the default format for legal information and reject printed materials that will seem bulky and cumbersome. How soon will this happen? If nothing else, give it three years for the current crop of law students, who will be among the profession’s earliest iPad adopters, to make their way into practice, then see what happens. That’s three years in which legal publishers need to shift their internal processes to accommodate new delivery, pricing and updating mechanisms for their content.
3. Design: Last fall, The Economist ran an article (subscription required) about the coming battle among Microsoft, Google and Apple for supremacy in cloud computing. Each of the contenders has an advantage: for Microsoft, it’s money (although neither Google nor Apple are exactly cash-poor), and for Google, it’s technology (although again, smart people abound in all three companies, as well as in dark-horse contenders like Amazon and Facebook). But if I had to bet on a winner — if not in the cloud, then in the industry generally — I’d say it’s Apple, for only one reason: design. Apple beats Microsoft, Google and every other competitor when it comes to the user interface — or, more colloquially, the customer experience. People enjoy using Apple products, and “enjoy” isn’t a word you normally associate with technology. At the end of the day, money, brains, functionality and so forth become ubiquitous and undifferentiated, such that your killer app can be topped almost before your new product is on the shelves. But a great user experience is a game-changer: not only is it hard to replicate, it almost inevitably leads competitors to imitate rather than fight.
You can probably see the application to law firms. With few exceptions, lawyers are very smart and law firms are very good at delivering legal services. “Excellence” isn’t a competitive advantage in the law and hasn’t been for decades. So firms look for other ways to stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, extremely few succeed. Law firms almost all go about their work exactly the same way: they pitch clients the same way, go about their tasks the same way, bill their work the same way, treat their clients the same way. Any client who has had the opportunity to sample the offerings of multiple law firms can attest that, for all practical purposes, they really are all the same. No wonder clients, especially these days, are so focused on price and especially on predictable fees: they’re hunting for something, anything they can use to justify choosing one law firm over another.
There’s only one silver bullet here — only one thing that a firm can do that its rivals can’t match and its clients will love: the customer experience. From marketing to client intake to processes to results to invoices to follow-up, how a firm relates to its clients throughout the life of a retainer is the most important element of all. The design of your firm — the experience your clients have before, during and after retaining your services — is critically important, because it’s unique to your firm, it’s 100% focused on the customer, and it can’t be copied or imitated. My Edge International colleague Gerry Riskin wrote about this more than three years ago in an article called “Intelligent Design for Law Fims“:
You’ve heard of practice management — but do we discuss “Practice Design”? Not yet. If law firms truly want to capture the attention of the marketplace, to stand out for all the right reasons, they need to start thinking more about how they present themselves to the market and how they deliver their services. By committing time and resources to law practice design, innovative firms would open up whole new frontiers of competitive advantage over their rivals.
Apple doesn’t get everything right, but it does make sure that everything it makes and everything it does puts the customer experience front and center. How many law firms can honestly say that? How many lawyers can say, and back it up with evidence, that the ways in which they work, communicate and bill their services are designed and delivered with the client’s complete personal satisfaction in mind? If your firm wants to have a fighting chance at making it through this coming decade in one piece, then it needs to take a lesson from Apple: design matters. If the customer is delighted, you win.
The iPad doesn’t do everything, but it doesn’t need to. It does what it does really well, and it makes its customer feel good doing it. There are a lot worse mottos your law firm could adopt.
$20 says you have one in your hands by Christmas.
I’m not prepared to take that bet at this point in time. :-)
I’m convinced that there’s a huge market here that those of us who are earlier adopters and fairly tech savvy can’t see — hence the scoffing on the blogs. Twice I’ve been in rooms with eight, ten people in their 40s and 50s, when chat about the iPad began. In both instances, when we came to the “buy” question, hands shot up that surprised me. These were the folks without smart phones, maybe with a laptop but seldom used: the tech skeptics, really. The iPad is the machine they want: simple, easy (because it’s from Apple — they know without even trying it out), big for aging eyes, but not heavy or awkward, does email, and above all lets them read on a screen in a civilized way.
My guess is that there is a large component of the legal profession that, BlackBerrys notwithstanding, as we say in the biz, are less than wild about what computers have offered them up to now. The Pad’s a game changer for these people.
The design argument is well put in this presentation, entitled Simplicity Sells:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells.html
The world would be a better place if simplicity sold. The truth is that simplicity buys.
I wish we could all be spared from simple-minded notions about simplicity. Wikipedia provides a convenient and relatively simple “Comparison of e-book formats” which ought to be enough to dispel the notion that by creating yet another proprietary e-book format, Apple is simplifying anything.
Here on archive.org is Curtis’ 1847 A treatise on the law of copyright in books, dramatic and musical compositions, letters and other manuscripts, engravings and sculpture, as enacted and administered in England and America; with some notices of the history of literary property. Interested readers can sample several of the formats, and read the “Help reading texts” portion of the FAQ.
Congratulations to Apple on producing some great hardware. Shame on them for making the device less programmable than it ought to be. The brilliance of computing is in the radically simple notion of the universal Turing machine. It’s another of those venerably simple notions, like mathematical induction and countable infinity in relation to all things digital, that intellectual property law, especially in the U.S., hasn’t yet quite been able to comprehend.
What does the iPad symbolize? Design? Yes. Applications? Yes. Access to media – of all types? Yes.
But to me it represents the next step to the Holy Grail – a computer that actually works and interacts with you – they way you want it to, rather than the opposite.
We all have had our fill of clunky, user-unfriendly technology (my LCD TV, Blu-ray DVD and cable box from Shaw are a notorious example – each has their own remote and each remote has myriad buttons and bewildering options and interfaces – and you must get each to talk to each other just to watch a newscast or view a movie – is a great example of horrible design and terrible functionality) and I happen to be a geek who enjoys technology! But I want it to be easy, fast and intuitive.
So there may be shortfalls with the iPad, such as not including a camera etc…all of which will be remedied in time, I am sure. Just look at the progress that has been made from a mainframe IBM 360 computer (circa 1970) to the iPad of today.
Does this analogy apply to law firms? Absolutely – legal consumers want a law firm to be easy, fast, intuitive and ..dare I say it…inexpensive? Is there a Steve Jobs actively redesigning the law firm of tomorrow? Not that I can see – yet. But I will bet dollars to iPads that there are people out there…burning the midnight environmentally-friendly bulbs..who are trying to think up ways to deliver legal services in a similar consumer-friendly way.
As the iPad has shown, if you can deliver the design + the applications into the hands of the consumer in a way the consumer wants, the world is your oyster.
Let the games begin…
Here’s the embarrassing moment when I confess that I wrote carelessly. Vague press reports had me thinking that the compatibility issues with the iPad were due to a new format; it turns out that what most people are worrying about is just plain old DRM. Here are a couple of good articles: Peter Svensson, “iPad E-Book Format Could Confuse, Irritate Consumers“; and David Rothman, “Apple’s iPad DRM uncertainties make the Financial Times: ePub gummed up“.
It seems Apple will be using the .epub format, an existing open standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum.
Amazon’s preferred format is .azw, an adaptation of .mobi or mobipocket. As reported by Bill Rosenblatt, “Amazon.com Acquires Mobipocket“, Amazon bought Mobipocket in 2005.
Barnes and Noble’s preferred format is .pdb. As the letters suggest, the original was the Palm DB format, but the ereader software is now available for many devices. The Nook is based on the Android operating system from the Open Handset Alliance led by Google.
The preferred format of Sony and Canon until recently (see below) was .lrs. The name came from “Librie Reader Source”, but the format was later named BBeB (Broadband ebook). Sony provides information to registered developers at http://www.prslabs.com/. Another source of information is http://www.msh-tools.com/ebook/lrfformat.html. Anyone fluent in Japanese could have a look at http://ps.canon-its.jp/bc/.
When BBeB was announced in 2006, Bill McCoy of Adobe wrote “Sony BBeB and eBook formats“. The key sentence is:
EPUB is the successor to OEB that McCoy was expecting.
As indicated in “EPUB, iPad and Content Interoperability“, Adobe would have been happier if Apple had used Adobe Content Server 4 instead of its own DRM. In August 2009, Paul Biba reported that Sony would use Adobe’s DRM: “Major news: Sony goes EPUB only; scraps its own format!!“. In October, David Rothman reported a similar arrangment: “Barnes & Noble adopts open EPUB eBook Format, PDF and Adobe Content Server“.
Of course, the basic point remains that these companies go to a lot of trouble to make their devices less functional than they could be. It’s a flaw in the incentive system provided by our IP laws.
I think Mr. Furlong could go a little further than describing the iPad as a content consumption device. While there will be plenty of that, I see its true benefits in using it as a communication tool and a tool for increasing my work flexibility.
As a communication tool, I envision applications that allow for flexible presentations to clients or juries. Sure, the heavy lifting of much content creation is done on a full blown machine. But when you just want to truly communicate to someone, you need the technology get out of the way. At this, a device like the iPad should excel. Seth Godin describes it as a “talking pad.” I viewed it as a tool for the storytelling nearly all of us do as part of our practice.
As for work flexibility, an overwhelming majority of what I do does not require the horsepower of a full PC. I can handle much from my iPhone. Much is platform or location agnostic and only a small percentage requires the tools provided by my firm (and in those cases, only because that is the infrastructure in place, not that it couldn’t be done another way). A day of practice includes dozens of short emails, answering questions, quick reference, a short calculation, etc. I can do much of that on my iPhone now, except for more substantive drafting. An iPad, I believe, will give me more choices about how and where I can do more of my work: in the office, at a coffee shop, at my kid’s school, at home, whatever.
Products that give me choices and flexibility are the products I buy. Choices in how I communicate with clients and flexibility in how I deliver my services. Even if it can’t do everything, I’m betting that the benefits will far outweigh the limitations.