iPad Lawyers

I’m back from spending several days in Chicago for the American Bar Association’s annual TechShow conference. As always, I had a great time and met many readers and MPU listeners, which is kind of awesome.

While last year, the iPad was a novelty at the conference, this year it almost appeared to be standard issue. Almost everyone had one. During my talk about technology at trial, I looked out to a packed room and was able to count the number of open laptops on one hand. Just about everybody else was using an iPad. The title of this post is “iPad Lawyers” instead of “Tablet Lawyers” for a reason. In three days I only saw a few Kindles and one Samsung. Every other tablet was an iPad.

The reason this seems such great news for Apple is that the law profession is legendary for it’s disdain of the Mac and its love of Windows. I’d venture that a healthy majority of the iPad toting lawyers I saw don’t own Macs. While the glut of iPads at Macworld | iWorld didn’t shock me, at the ABA conference it does.

I know that real competition for the iPad is supposed to show up any day now but in the meantime, I can’t help but wonder how that game of catchup plays out with all of these users getting attached to their iPads. Times are a’changing.