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University of Victoria Law School Tech Survey of Incoming Students
Once again Rich McCue has published the results of his annual survey of incoming law students at the University of Victoria. His executive summary of the results is as follows:
- 84% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up dramatically from 50% last year), with 42% of the total being iPhones, 13% Android and 27% Blackberry’s.
- 19% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers.
- 98% of students own laptops, and 16% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
- 50% of student laptops are Mac’s, up from 44% last year.
- The average laptop price stayed basically the same as last year at $1,186, which is down from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
- The students’ average typing speed was was 60 wpm.
- 72% of all students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
- 55% of students use Gmail as their primary email account (up from 49% last year), 9% use UVic email and 22% Hotmail.
- 60% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing (down from 67%). 30% favor Google Docs (up from 27%) and 2% OpenOffice.
- 58% of students report backing up their primary computer on a regular basis. 60% of those backing up do so to an external hard drive and 25% to a cloud storage solution.
- 97% of students use Facebook (up from 91%) and 92% (up from 80%) would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar.
None of this surprises me, except perhaps the number of students using Google Docs, which is higher than I would have supposed. And while I’m glad to see that most students are backing up their computers, I wonder if I believe them. That 50% of their laptops are Macs suggests that law firms had better get ready — readier than they are, certainly — to accommodate Apple’s operating system.
It would be great to see other law schools imitating Rich in this and generating some data as to what the profession might expect as regards technological devices and expectations.
The only real surprise from the survey for me was that only 19% of students have tablets or ebook readers. I must be living in a tech bubble or something, because I was confident that the number would be closer to 40%.
I suspect that once more text book publishers put out eText Books that are less expensive than hard copies, that the number of eBook readers owned by students will rise significantly.
What stood out for me in the results is the variance in social media platforms between these incoming students and the profession at large. In my experience Linkedin is the social media service of choice for lawyers. Many lawyers are on facebook, but almost always only in a personal capacity, and only a very very small minority are on twitter.
In contrast, fully a quarter of these incoming students are already on twitter, while a smaller percentage (21%) are on linkedin. This suggests two things to me for firms to be mindful of: 1) facebook is the student social media channel of choice (important for recruiting purposes), and 2) part of firms social media strategies should be directed towards helping/advising young associates to replicate some of their existing networks on facebook over into linkedin.