Nicole Black, BridgeTower Media Newswires
The iPhone celebrated its 10-year anniversary this year. In 2017, a decade after its release, it’s still the most popular smartphone with lawyers according to the recently released American Bar Association’s 2017 Legal Technology Survey Report. Of the lawyers surveyed, 96% used smartphones for law-related purposes while away from their office. And, the iPhone was the most popular smartphone by far, with 75% of lawyers surveyed using an iPhone rather an Android.
The Apple Watch, on the other hand, just celebrated its 2-year anniversary. Although I’ve not yet encountered any data on the percentage of lawyers using smartwatches, over time I’ve noticed more and more Watches appearing “in the wild,” including on the wrists of lawyers. So I wasn’t surprised to learn last month that since its launch, more than 30 million Apple Watches have been shipped.
Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of iPhone and Apple Watch apps to choose from, and I’m sure you’ve already got more than a few favorites. But you could always use more, so here are my choices for apps that are must-haves for lawyers.
First, if your practice areas require you to interact with people who speak a different language, a translation app is a must. For your iPhone, consider Speak and Translate, a free app that automatically translates what you say into the spoken word of one of 54 different languages. It also supports text-to-text translations between 117 languages. For your Apple Watch, there’s iTranslate Converse. This app ($4.99/ month) allows you to translate conversations in over 100 languages. To use it, you simply speak into your Watch, which then automatically translates your spoken word into the appropriate language.
Another Apple Watch app to consider is Just Press Record ($4.99). This is a very useful app for recording and transcribing conversations and meetings. It allows you to record for an unlimited amount of time and then transfer the recording to your iPhone for transcription.
Another iPhone app that will appeal to lawyers is the free Time & Date Calculator app. Because we spend so much time calculating dates — such as due dates for a motion determining how long ago an incident occurred — a time and date calculator app is a must-have. This app provides a lot of flexibility and built-in tools to help you calculate dates across time zones and even down to the second.
My favorite iPhone scanning app is Scanner Pro. It costs $3.99, and lets you scan a document using your iPhone and then upload it as a PDF. The app also formats the uploaded document with OCR (text recognition) so that you can easily search the text of the document.
And last but not least is the Overcast podcast app for both the iPhone and Apple Watch. Ever since the Serial podcast took the world by storm, lawyers have become huge fans of podcasts. If you’ve jumped on the podcast bandwagon, then you need an intuitive, easy-to-use podcast app like Overcast. It’s a free app that is ad-supported, but you can have an ad-free experience for $9.99/year. With the iPhone app, you can play podcasts right on your phone and the Watch app allows you to choose and control the podcasts playing on your iPhone from across the room.
So there you have it: a few of my favorite iPhone and Apple Watch apps for lawyers. There are plenty more, of course, so don’t let me selections limit you. And if you don’t already own an Apple Watch, what are you waiting for? Add it to your wish list for the holidays. I assure you, you won’t regret it!
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Nicole Black is a director at MyCase.com, a cloud-based law practice management platform. She is also of counsel to Fiandach & Fiandach in Rochester and is a GigaOM Pro analyst. She is the author of the ABA book “Cloud Computing for Lawyers,” coauthors the ABA book “Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier,” and co-authors “Criminal Law in New York,” a West-Thomson treatise. She speaks regularly at conferences regarding the intersection of law and technology. She publishes three legal blogs and can be reached at niki@mycase.com.
