Jim Calloway, BridgeTower Media Newswires
At a recent discussion on smartphones at a bar association annual meeting, an attendee pulled out an old-style flip phone and smiled at us.
This happens a lot, although not nearly with the frequency it did several years ago. Sometimes the lawyer is sheepish about still having a flip phone, and other times the attorney is proud of having avoided what he views as the additional complexity and expense of operating a smartphone.
The idea of people carrying a device that is a phone and a powerful computing device connected to the internet is not going to go away. So let’s cover a few things lawyers can do with their smartphones today.
Speech-to-text and other speech tools
That small microphone graphic on the iOS keyboard when you are typing into your phone is an invitation for you to dictate that text or email instead of typing on the tiny keyboard. It works amazingly well, but not perfectly.
Siri will allow iOS users to draft and send emails and texts without touching any button other than the Home button. Android users will want to install the Google keyboard.
Practice management software
The majority of today’s practice management software tools have either a smartphone app or responsive website that works well with smartphones. If you are not using practice management software, you probably should be. If you are, then you should see if smartphone functions are available with your particular system.
Billing
If you don’t have a practice management software tool that allows you to do billing entries on your smartphone, you need to develop a way to capture time on your phone so you do not forget any billing information. There are applications that handle that task.
Brian Focht on his Cyber Advocate blog reviews several of these in his post “6 Excellent Timekeeping Apps for Lawyers.”
Copy a physical document and file it
You have a piece of paper in your hand and want to make a copy of it or file it. This is now pretty simple. You use the smartphone’s camera to take a picture of the document, and use the appropriate scanning app to convert it to a PDF and file it.
This is particularly handy for receipts that might get lost or are on cheap thermal paper that will fade and become unreadable.
There are many apps that will convert a photograph to a PDF file on your smartphone. They include CamScanner, Microsoft Office Lens, Genius Scan, Scanner Pro, Scanbot and FineScanner. Check to see whether the OCR function requires a paid version app and whether there is a built-in configuration to save to your preferred cloud storage.
Some may like the idea that Microsoft Office Lens will not only convert to a PDF but also to editable Word and PowerPoint files. One does have to sign up for a Microsoft account to do this, and the formatting often will be less than perfect, but it is a great free tool.
Managing PDF files
GoodReader has been referred to as the Swiss Army knife of PDF readers and annotation apps. At $4.99, it is an app that every lawyer who deals with PDFs on a mobile device should have, in my opinion.
For those who want to examine tools that many consider more powerful, look at PDF Expert and PDFpen. Jeff Richardson’s iPhoneJD.com is the go-to website for reviews of these tools and other iOS apps that lawyers might want to use.
Documents on a smartphone
Most people who just want to look at a document that was emailed to them find that their email program’s built-in viewer works well enough. Documents To Go (Android, iOS), at a cost of up to $14.99, has long been a powerful document editing tool on a mobile device, however Microsoft Office (Android, iOS) instantly became the tool of choice for most when it was finally released for mobile.
You can download Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free, and you can use Microsoft OneDrive to sync these files with your PC. Microsoft Outlook is also available if you are an Office 365 subscriber.
Obtaining a signature
DocuSign Mobile is a popular electronic signature app, and Adobe Fill & Sign, designed to work with PDF fillable forms, looks interesting. RightSignature provides the iOS app for iPad or iPhone with any paid plan. SignMyPad has both iOS and Android versions.
GPS
Since the theme of this column is smartphone uses one might not know about, I have to include turn-by-turn GPS functionality. Google Maps is still superior to Apple Maps in my opinion, but some say it is a much closer contest today. And if you have an Apple Watch, you definitely will want Apple Maps for walking directions.
Reminders
Location-based reminders have been a part of the iPhone ecosystem since iOS 5, and they are an easy-to-use Siri tool. One just engages Siri and starts with the phrase “remind me to” followed by any reminder such as “pick up my dry cleaning when I leave work” or “set the DVR when I get home.”
Detailed instructions are available online, and one can even set up a list, such as a shopping list, and share with another via iCloud.
Security
If you ever have any client information on your smartphone (including email), then you should employ these basic security steps:
1) You must use a passcode to protect your phone from others being able to access your information, and that passcode needs to be longer than the four digits required by some older operating systems.
2) You should be extremely cautious about logging into any WiFi network that does not require a password. By definition, they are not secure.
3) You should understand how the “find your lost phone” application works on your phone.
4) You should understand how the remote data wiping feature of your phone works so you can erase any data if the phone is lost and cannot be found.
5) You should backup the information on your phone. This is technically only required for client information if there is no duplicate copy of the information. But you want everything backed up so you can restore it if need be. And you could find yourself in the position in which critical client data existed only on your phone, e.g. pictures taken at the scene of an accident.
Conclusion
Information flows freely in the world today. If you want to do something with your phone but don’t know how, a brief search on the internet likely will provide an answer. If there’s something you really want to do with your phone, you’re probably not the first person who wanted to do that. As the saying goes, your research may reveal that there’s an app for that.
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Jim Calloway is director of the Oklahoma Bar Association Management Assistance Program. He publishes the weblog Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips at http://jimcalloway.typepad.com.
