The iPad has promised to deliver a new reality we had never even imagined, writes Angela Priestley, but further development is needed before it can ever hit the legal mainstream.

It's been eight months since Apple's Steve Jobs unveiled the long-awaited iPad. What followed was a level of hysteria, from both consumers and business-users alike, with many declaring that the iPad was the "anywhere" device we'd all been waiting for.

Already, the iPad has found a niche with consumers, but the business community has been a harder sell for Apple. And with most lawyers already carrying laptops, blackberries and/or iPhones, do they really need yet another device?

Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers, was an early adopter of the iPad but quickly declared his disappointment in the device and its potential application in the practice of law. Quoted in The Times in London earlier this year, he particularly took issue with the fact that neither Microsoft Word nor Powerpoint could run on the iPad - except via workarounds. It's a "hassle", he said, that might make the iPad a difficult laptop replacement for lawyers, and therefore a difficult sell altogether. "For lawyers indifferent to high-tech devices and who like immediate gratification from their technology, the first iteration of the iPad, unlike the BlackBerry, will not dominate the legal world," he said.

It seems, at least in Australia, that Susskind has been correct in his prediction.

While plenty of individual lawyers have purchased an iPad for their individual computing needs, few law firms have stepped up to do anything particularly significant with the device - possibly due to the iPad's limited productivity capabilities. As one legal academic, Peter Black from QUT, tells Lawyers Weekly, "It's a fantastic device for consuming media, be that your email, books, PDF documents, videos and audio files ... but it's not a media creation device."

It seems before real mainstream adoption of the iPad takes off in the legal profession, the iPad will need to prove its worth - be it through the development of useful applications, through its innovative use by some large law firms or simply via its later versions.

The early adopters

According to Lawyers Weekly research, widespread adoption of the iPad in the Australian legal profession has been limited, but there are some exceptions. Swaab Attorneys, for one, has recently acquired iPads for all its fee-earners. The firm's CEO, Bronwyn Pott, says the rollout provides a useful addition to the tools lawyers can utilise in and out of the office and that Apple has been keen to work with Swaab in a bid to identify just how a law firm could wholly embrace the iPad.

But Pott says while she finds the device a pleasure to read documents on, she has also identified some shortcomings of the iPad and readily notes that rolling them out to fee-earners was as much an opportunity for the firm to show its support to its employees as it was to improve accessibility. "It's a nice thing to do, we have a lot of young lawyers and they were particularly chuffed about it," she says.

"I don't find them particularly nice for doing a lot of work on, but they're a lovely platform for reading on. If you have a long document you want to read on the train, or run through with a client, that's where we're getting the value out of them," says Pott.

Meanwhile, Melbourne criminal law firm Doogue & O'Brien has also distributed iPads to lawyers. Bill Doogue, the firm's managing partner, was himself an early adopter and quickly realised just how useful the device was in court. He made the decision to purchase iPads for all his lawyers off the back of a number of benefits he believed would assist in productivity and accessibility.

"The first one is everyone likes a toy, but then it also provides access to our client database (the award winning Crimebase) that has previous court results and things like that," says Doogue.

"The other thing is legislation. They are amazing for being able to access legislation in court ... So you just have bookmarks to the various important acts and you can get to it immediately."

While these things can be done with a laptop, Doogue says the portability of an iPad and its ability to swiftly fire up when needed make it much more useful.

Doogue also identifies the usefulness of the iPad for occupying "dead time", particularly for a lawyer who is in and out of court, and as such, he's noticed a number of barristers and lawyers in criminal courts using the device.

Bring on the developers

An iPad might provide a great tool for lawyers who spend a lot of time in court, but for those who spend most of their time in the office, is it really necessary?

The fact is that an iPad is neither a desktop nor a laptop; it sits somewhere in between. For many legal employers, deploying an "in between" product with its associated maintenance costs and security risks will not be an appealing proposition.

What will be appealing is if the iPad can harness capabilities that laptops and smartphones can't, especially if it can open a new world of opportunity - be it for work productivity, presentations or document analysis.

And what will truly make such capabilities interesting is in the development of apps - an area that even after eight months, few can predict just where it will head next.

One firm attempting to leap ahead of the market by using the iPad to offer value to clients is Carter Newell, which has recently launched the CN Airports and Liability Guide as an eBook ready for the device and available via iTunes.

It's a small move that the firm has undertaken in a bid to kick-start just where the firm could harness the value of the hardware and potentially deliver an app in the future. Dr Peter Ellender, the firm's CEO, says that with a number of lawyers already experimenting with an iPad in his firm, he's looking long-term to see what it could really offer.

"We see that it will be something for the future because it provides you with the information at your fingertips. It's a highly searchable document, so it's very handy to have because of the powerful search facility," he says.

"Ultimately, you could take it to great extremes where a lot of the documents that we use at the moment turn up and are received and used on such devices - not just iPads, but something similar as well. Could you imagine briefs getting to counsel or being read on that same format?"

In the top-tier, however, the enthusiasm has been somewhat quiet. At a recent Cisco Lawyers Weekly CIO roundtable, CIO representatives of the top-tier could not see an immediate future for iPads in their firms. "It's great for watching movies," noted Chris Holmes, the information systems director at Allens Arthur Robinson. "It's also wonderful for presentations, but it's an awkward machine to work with."

Peter Westerveld, the CIO at Minter Ellison, questioned whether or not legal IT departments are ready to offer lawyers a third device, on top of their phones and laptops, and questioned the assumption that the iPad serves as an "anywhere" device. "It's not an 'anywhere' device, you can't put it in your pocket. The term I use is armchair device. The challenge is, do you want to give lawyers a third device with the associated risks, and can it be justified?"

But at the same roundtable, Gerard Neiditsch, executive director for business integration and technology at Mallesons, said that his firm has identified a particular purpose for the iPad that it will look to roll out in the future. While he was not prepared to reveal anything to Lawyers Weekly at the time, he said it would be very different to anything other law firms are currently doing. "I didn't come up with it, but somebody really clever in our organisation said 'why don't we do X'. and we thought it was a fantastic idea. As soon as they said it, we said 'ok, let's try it'."

Leave it to the kids

With or without some significant innovative investment from law firms into the iPad, it may be that law students, as they graduate and move into law firms, really push the iPad into the legal mainstream. QUT's Black says a number of students are already going paperless in his lectures by downloading their case readings and lecture notes on the iPad. Still, Black would not go so far as to say iPads are replacing laptops just yet amongst his students, especially given the lack of text books available on the device, and the fact that electronic devices are not allowed in open book exams.

That may be about to change. Javier Dopico associate director, Pacific Texts at LexisNexis, says the publisher is preparing to digitise their textbooks and work with Apple on distribution via the iPad - as well as a number of other devices. While he believes the fact electronic devices are banned in open book exams may hinder the uptake of eBooks by students, he notes that evolution of the examination process may occur to make eBooks truly viable.

"Until universities effectively change their open book exam policy, there will be a hindrance to the take up of the iPad based on being able to take it into an exam," he says.

But should the scope of exams change in the future to accommodate electronic advices, then iPads may well provide a simple way to cart around, and manage the note-taking associated with, legal text books.

And with law students on board, it may only be a matter of time before lawyers do receive a third device to add to their arsenal of technology goods. With further development - be it in the application or hardware space - the "third device" could quickly become as essential item for the connected lawyer.

Who knows: perhaps one day the "anywhere" device we have so longed for could become the "anywhere" device we simply can't escape.