Canadian Lawyer InHouse

Law Department Management How tablets found a home in-house Adoption of portable technology tools to handle documents and processes in-house is growing. By Shane Schick Lately, when Todd Croll goes to a board meeting, he's walking with a little lightness in his step. Not necessarily because he loves board meetings — does anybody, even a CEO, love board meetings? — but because he's no longer carrying around a heavy board book to the conference room. Instead, all the information is available on an iPad.  Croll, who is general counsel and corporate secretary at Global Container Terminals Inc. in Vancouver, said his firm is among those that have adopted Diligent Boardbooks, an application that turns traditional governance documents into something that resembles an e-book. It means his senior management team, almost all of whom have Apple iPads, can get most of the materials they need entirely in digital form. It can also include calendars, past minutes, and links that allow them to toggle back and forth through particular sections of the board book and back to the agenda. "We still have hard copies, but it's allowed us to customize preferences to our directors," Croll says. "I think without exception they love it." Croll loves it too. Electronic board books are just one example of how iPads and other tablets are transforming the way in-house lawyers operate. While concerns around IT security and integration with traditional business software continue to be worked out, there is every indication more corporate counsel will be seen toting around a tablet in lieu of, or as a complement to, their laptops.  The use of tablets among legal professionals is only part of a national trend within the larger business community. Toronto-based research firm IDC Canada said IT managers expect 31 per cent of employees to not only be using tablets in 2014, but tablets they buy themselves.  "We see multiple devices rather than one single device becoming the norm in business and also at home," group vice president Tony Olvet said in a webcast in December.  "We are right now at the cusp of the great inflection point when tablets and smartphones together outnumber the install base of PCs." That shift is partly driven by the fact consumers are experimenting with tablets in their personal lives, then applying it to their work as it makes sense. That's certainly true of lawyers, says Tom Mighell, a Dallasbased lawyer and e-discovery consultant who wrote iPad in One Hour for Lawyers. The appeal of iPads in particular among lawyers basically comes down to ease of use. "It's not a Windows computer everyone has trouble with. There's no 'blue screen of death.' Right out of the box you can start working on it," he says, adding he wrote his book because he recognized a need to help lawyers identify professional use cases.  "If you look around the average office, most of the lawyers who are in the room are using them to check their mail or play Words With Friends or chess or search the web, and not making as much use out of it as they could be." Those in the Canadian legal profession who have become savvy tablet users are probably self-educated rather than formally trained. That was the case with Salvatore Mirandola, a lawyer with Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, who began using an iPad two or three years ago. He says after reading books on the subject canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse February 2014 39

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