Two New Legal Apps for iPhone/iPad Show Future Directions

Two New Legal Apps for iPhone/iPad Show Future Directions

by David Curle, Director & Lead Analyst - Minneapolis, Minnesota


* Two new apps for the iPhone and the iPad point to the possibilities of mobile applications in the legal space. One is a broad publishing platform; the other is the equivalent of an electronic cheat-sheet for trial litigators.

Important Details: Two new iPhone apps for lawyers are beginning to push the boundaries of what we've seen in the legal app world so far:

* Courtroom Objections [1] is a nifty tool for litigators who need to quickly find a good "script" for a specific objection at trial. The app lists various kinds of objections (such as objections to admissibility of evidence or objections to the form of a question) that might come up at trial. The user can browse through headings to the relevant objection, and is provided with the exact wording of a suggested objection. This is the iPhone equivalent of the stacks of note cards or other quick-reference devices that a lawyer might otherwise have on hand at trial.

* LawBox [2] is an entirely different animal. On first examination, it appears to be a rather mundane collection of rules and other legal content combined with a news reader with which the user can subscribe to a number of pre-selected law-related RSS feeds. But on another level, LawBox is designed as a publishing platform on which other parties (publishers, law firms, and other organizations) can offer legal content. LawBox comes with a built-in set of the most common rule sets (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Evidence, etc) and has an option to purchase other jurisdiction-specific content (titles from a state code, for example) from publishers who deliver on the LawBox platform. A new 2.0 release includes a host of navigation and community features, including the ability to annotate specific items and share commentary. Third-party publishers can also use the platform to develop their own apps: the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, for example, has developed an app that contains 15 criminal codes commonly used by Association members.

Implications: In an earlier Insights post we identified a number of different types of apps for mobile devices that were beginning to appear for the iPhone and other devices (see Insights, New Fastcase iPhone App and The Challenge of Mobile, January 28, 2010). The Courtroom Objections app clearly fits one of the types of apps we expected to see more of: apps that "do one narrow, specific thing, quickly and efficiently". The app contains information that might be found buried in much longer treatises or practice guides, but which becomes more useful and accessible in this new format - to be taken out and used in a specific point in the lawyer's workflow.

LawBox is notable more for its as a longer-term implications than its immediate utility. If LawBox can build a publishing platform attractive to other publishers and content owners, one that works particularly well with the highly structured and cross-referenced content used in legal materials, it could emerge as a new alternative platform for lots of legal content.
This is the opposite of the "do one thing well" philosophy; it could eventually mean the ability for a single app to serve as an aggregation point for much of the specialized legal content that a lawyer might wish to have at hand at any given time, and it can also be a focal point for the development of targeted apps for specific legal audiences.

It's clear that we are still in the early days of the development of compelling mobile apps for legal professionals; both of these offerings show many of the telltale signs of the early stages of an agile development process. Yet both give hints of some of the different directions mobile apps can take in professional markets