Probably the #1 question I get from lawyers asking about the iPad is “Does it work with Microsoft Word?” The reason for this isn’t surprising given the ubiquity of Word in law firms and client environments. But more and more, I’ve felt like these folks are asking the wrong question. The better question, in my mind, is “What is the best way to write while mobile?” As I’ve said before, Word is a formatting application, not a writing application. If you want to write, there are far better tools for the job, most of which rely on plain text.
I’ve been wrestling with how to effectively make the case that mobile lawyers should consider text editors in their writing workflow. Fortunately, David Sparks makes the case beautifully in his post yesterday The Joy of Text over at MacSparky:
The watershed event, however, was the iPad. Very quickly after using the iPad, I realized I didn’t need a full blown word processor on my iPad as much as I needed a way to enter, edit, and manipulate text. It had to be seamless and fast. iPad developers largely delivered and the Dropbox API provides the glue to hold it all together. Now we can write 1,000 words on our Macs, add 500 more on our PCs, rewrite the introduction on our iPads from a park bench and do the final proofread over a Taco on our phones, all using text.
Sure, there are many times as a lawyer where you need to edit a Word file and there are plenty of great tools on the iPad for doing just that. But for the draft brief, the file memo, the first cut at a chunk of correspondence, the insert to the contract and all the other things that lawyers write, using plain text as the basis of your writing workflow will enhance your productivity and mobility. For example, this post started its life as a one line entry of text on my iPhone made on the web synced text editor, Simplenote (iTunes link). I expanded it into a rough draft of a post on my PC, again on Simplenote in my browser. I finalized it, still in text, on my iPad over lunch. A quick copy and paste into into WordPress and I’m done. If this was a letter to a client or an insert to a contract, it could just as easily been pasted into Word for final formatting. I could not have done the writing nearly as easily using Word files and I would have been distracted all along the way to make formatting revisions when I just needed to be writing.
Want to give text a try? Start small. Grab the Hogs Bay Software app Plaintext from the App Store (iTunes link) and get it synced up with a Dropbox account. Both are free, easy and a great start on a path to better text.
My one complaint is that while it is nice at times to just work with the text, there are other times where you are on the move, editing a document that is in its final rounds and don’t want to have to go through the hassle of copying and pasting and editing the style/formats for pleadings. I sometimes wish that an app would hold the formatting, even if you couldn’t manipulate the formating, but allow you to edit the text.
If that makes any sense.
Agreed. It generally isn’t productive to go back and forth once a document has made it into a Word file. I like your idea for an app though!
If only I knew anything about programming. SIgh.
The problem is. Despite all the hoopla on the internet. After owning an ipad for almost a year, there is no easy way to pull a form, cut and paste from prior docs, cut and paste from West, use Wordperfect files, and/or essentially begin and end a document from start to finish on the ipad. I can do this with my three year old $200 netbook that has only an 8 gig hard drive. I can do it on a twelve year old laptop running Windows 2000. I can do it there without dropbox and tons of wasted time. I can do it there with free Openoffice. I can tether my netbook, for free, to my blackberry and send the file where I want it. I love the ipad. It’s an awesome toy. But, please people quit wasting so much time explaining how after hours of work and numerous dollars you’ve been able to almost get this thing to do what a dirt cheap netbook has done for years.
I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Bart I am.