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I am a lawyer, my boss uses an ipad pro heavily for work. He usually does not have much time to work on stuff, we mail him the contracts, documents etc., he mar
by terminalcommand 4y ago
I am a lawyer, my boss uses an ipad pro heavily for work. He usually does not have much time to work on stuff, we mail him the contracts, documents etc., he marks them up with digital pen with his comments and sends it to us to revise. He finds it extremely productive. He can give instructions on the go, even while physically walking to a meeting room.
Prior to the ipad pro, we literally took printouts and handed it to the boss for his comments. He doesn't bother with word comments. Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors still work this way.
For jobs not requiring much typing and special software, iPad pro can be a good addition.
For replacing my work computer, oh no.
If I were provisioned an ipad pro, I'd use it to read and markup contracts, look up legislation, occasionally jump into calls and I'd be pretty happy. I could work on my commute, quickly review documents and respond in off-hours etc. instead of carrying a laptop. The IT provisioned laptop takes ages to boot up, heavier and more fragile than an ipad.
Another problem is that screen and keyboard doesn't quite replace pen and paper in my industry. I switched to Onenote from using a paper notebook during remote working and I miss taking notes on paper greatly. I frequently miss parts in contracts when I read on the screen and have to be extra careful. If I were in the office, I usually printed these out. I knew a senior lawyer who wanted us to print out every piece of related legislation so that she could work on it. She refused to read them on computer.
iPad pro could be highly beneficial for low-tech human mind driven industries such as law.
I know there is AI, I am grateful for redlines and spell checkers, but the computer screen and keyboard interface lacks in some ways.
- wlesieutre 4y agoI'm in an architecture adjacent company and often deal with PDF drawing sets. When I get a 400 page PDF with E-size pages and I'm trying to look through a whole building to find or count something in it, I send those right over to the iPad. Now that I think about it, displaying gigantic PDFs is probably the most performance intensive thing I use it for, and the iPad Pro is very fast at it.
- boppo1 4y agoWhat do you use for giant PDFs? I have some textbooks on mine, but nothing performs/functions as well as readera does on my android phone.
- wlesieutre 4y agoI’ve found PDF Viewer from PSPDFKit GmbH to perform very well, though I also sometimes use Documents by Readdle which lets me do things like reorder pages without a subscription. Not sure if Documents is still that way for new users or only because I paid for it back before everything under the sun turned into a subscription.
- boppo1 4y agoThanks!
- TexanFeller 4y agoiAnnotate handles my PDFs that are 100s of MBs with absolutely zero lag.
- Finnucane 4y ago>Many older senior lawyers who learned the practice before word processors Considering how long ago that is, they must be pretty old. I mean, I'm 58 and I can just barely remember that time.
- terminalcommand 4y agoThey are not young :). I live outside of US so technology might have come a bit later to us. And law is an industry that does not like change that much.
- gnicholas 4y agoI talked to a lawyer in his 70s about this. He liked the way that dictating forced him to consider his thoughts in advance and speak in paragraphs. Technology has made dictation/typing pools unnecessary, but it's worth considering the ways that it might have led to benefits that we currently miss out on.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lancesells 4y agoI've kind of found this with certain reporting that I used to automate. I used to be of mind that everything that can be automated should be automated. I've come to realize it's a big mistake as it limits my processing of information. Even cutting and pasting can have me thinking about something more than automating.
- massysett 4y agoHeh - I am a lawyer too. One of my old bosses didn't budge off paper even during covid. We had to email him PDFs of drafts so he could read them on his iPad and occasionally he would print them. If he had comments or revisions, he would print the draft, write his comments, and then use his iPhone as a makeshift scanner (no scanner app - he would just take pictures.) Once in a paper file I had the only example of A4 paper I've ever seen - I'm an American. He was traveling in Europe and we had to send the draft to his hotel so they could print it and give it to him. He wrote comments on it and brought it back. I'm not of his generation but I think I'd find an iPad pretty useless for work. I print most things I need to review so that I can read the closely and scrawl notes on them, though if I need to give the notes to someone else I put them into Word or on a PDF - but after printing it. I find it too cumbersome to review documents on the computer. The most I could use an iPad for is a second screen to look up statutes and cases and the like, or just to read emails - but it's too limiting even for emails. In Windows I drag emails to folders to save them, and I take notes with Notepad, go look stuff up in the browser, etc. The iPad is just too limiting.
- gnicholas 4y agoFormer lawyer here. iPads make much more sense for senior partners than for associates or junior partners. They're reviewing documents and writing emails, not composing long memos or doing intensive legal research on the web. The battery life and "boot time" differential are great for senior folks who don't need a desktop environment. I don't think this dichotomy maps onto technical roles, since there are more technical things you can't do on an iPad, but it's worth recognizing how much iPads can be a game-changer for some of the most senior people in organizations.