The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34686
SMART MOVES SUPPORTING iPADS FOR BUSINESS USE among others. A VPN connection to a firm’s intranet can also be created using the iPad’s built-in VPN capability. I use the SSL VPN technique, which allows me to browse my firm’s SharePoint-based intranet from Safari on the iPad. As one might expect, there are plenty of available native tools to support an attorney’s information consumption needs. Content creation is a bit more challenging. • Content-Creation Apps Many attorneys need to edit and create documents in addition to simply consuming information. Word processing and email are critical for this group. As with content consumption, we start off content creation with an easy win. The iPad has a perfectly capable email app. For those firms who do not want to co-mingle personal email accounts with corporate email accounts, Good Mobile Messaging is a more secure, but less feature- rich, email app. There are also a variety of competent choices for drafting or editing Word documents, although all of the editing apps contain only a small subset of the functions available in Word. Pages is Apple’s chart-topping word processing app, and a great choice for those who want to create documents of any complexity on the iPad. Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite and Documents To Go are good choices for those who want to simply revise existing documents, as they have a more limited feature set. All of these products support an external Bluetooth keyboard, which is important for those doing any serious typing, and all of these products have integration to synchronize files with various cloud services ranging from SharePoint servers, Google Docs, iDisk and Dropbox, among others. While integration with cloud storage sites such as Google Docs or Dropbox works for many businesses, most law firms will want integration into their own document management systems (DMS). There are options for many popular document management systems. The app for “Mobile device management (MDM) software allows firms to deploy the apps they want, and to sandbox them from other applications the user might install.” Worldox allows users to check out, revise and check in new versions of documents. Unfortunately, the apps that support the two best-known DMS players, Autonomy and OpenText, allow users to check out documents, but not to check revisions back in. Firms who have explored using SharePoint as their DMS should find it possible to synchronize edited documents back to their SharePoint sites. Without the ability to easily check edited documents back into the DMS, firms risk having unique work product on iPads. Potentially having unique work product on an iPad raises a variety of concerns. First and foremost, firms want work product protected by the risk management rigors in place at the datacenter, where activities such as backup, document retention/destruction, and litigation hold processing typically occur. To support document creation, firms need a reliable way for their users to upload new and changed work product to their DMSs. Second, because the user, not the firm, most likely owns the iPad, most firms would rather not mix personal data with firm data, especially since the firm will want to take drastic action, such as wiping the entire iPad clean of data, if it is reported lost or stolen or if the person owning the device leaves the firm. Finally, if the device is lost or stolen, most firms will want to ensure that all data is encrypted, which, aside from being prudent risk management, is important to comply with certain data privacy regulations. Securely encrypting an iPad is possible, but it can take a lot of manual effort on the part of the user if they have an older generation iPad that was upgraded to iOS 4.x. Each of these concerns can be addressed, but all of them pose challenges to the elegant implementation of a native app approach. • Practice-Specific Apps Not all lawyers need all tools. For example, not everyone needs Excel. Additionally, most litigators don’t use Workshare Compare or similar products, but document comparison is critical for corporate attorneys. There are a variety of practice-specific apps for the iPad. For example, TrialPad receives a lot of good press for Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 51