Good Lawyer Apps

Originally published by Jason P. Steed.

I haven’t written a blog post in a long time. Let’s blame it on my busy transition to a new law firm. Anyway, to get back on track I thought I’d write a quick post on the iPhone apps that I use most in my lawyerly activities. So, here they are, in no particular order:

Count – I love this little app for calculating deadlines. Super easy and cool, the way it works.

Dropbox – Most people are familiar with Dropbox. I love it. No better way to make my files easily accessible from anywhere, when I’m traveling or just working from home. Also makes it easy to post a link to a doc online (like a brief you just filed) or to send a doc to someone when you’re not at your computer.

Genius Scan – There are a lot of convert-to-PDF apps out there, and I have no idea whether this is the “best” one or not. But it’s the one I downloaded and learned how to use several years ago, so I’m used to it and I like it. Take photos of pages and the app will convert them to PDF for saving or sending. It’s come in handy so, so many times.

SignEasy – Ever need to sign a doc and send it back to someone? This app lets you do that without having to print first & scan after signing. Just open the doc in the app, affix your electronic signature, and send it back. You can also check boxes on forms, fill in dates, or use initials instead of full signature. It’s great.

Wunderlist – I love this app for making lists. Lists of books I need to read; articles I need to write; vinyl albums I want to buy; vinyl albums I already own; restaurants I like in the cities I travel to most frequently. Oh, and to-do lists. It’s good for that, too.

Twitter – Yes, Twitter. It’s where I get all my legal news (and regular news). It’s an alternative to email (using DMs). And for those of us who feel awkward at happy hour or at other in-person “networking” events, Twitter is a phenomenal networking (and marketing) tool. If you don’t already know about the #AppellateTwitter community, you’re way behind the curve. (See here, here, and here.) Get on the ball.

Bobby – I just discovered this app a couple weeks ago. It’s kind of awesome. You use it to track subscriptions, which for me means using it to track journal/magazine subscriptions as well as bar association and organization memberships. By “track,” I mean keep track of when it’s time to renew those memberships and subscriptions, so they don’t expire. This is especially helpful for those journals or organizations that never send reminders.

Patreon and the iPhone Podcasts app – I’m not devoted to the pre-installed podcast app, but I’ve never bothered to find an alternative. I don’t care that much about the app itself; the point here is that you need a podcast app of some kind. This is where I use this post about apps as a vehicle for telling you about the law-related podcasts you should listen to. I use Patreon (the app) to get the insider-only episodes of First Mondays, and I just use the pre-installed Podcasts app to get everything else. And for me, “everything else” includes First Mondays, Slate’s Amicus, What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, Oyez’s Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Heightened Scrutiny, and Radiolab’s More Perfect. If you have recommendations for really good law-related podcasts, I’d love to hear them.

VoiceRecorder – I don’t use it for work very often, but, when my oral argument prep includes recording myself, this is the app I use.

MiniKeePass – This is the password-management app I use. Nothing flashy. I’m sure there are others that are more user-friendly, etc., but this is the one I got used to several years ago.

Time (Intapp) – I haven’t actually used this app yet, but my new firm uses Intapp’s desktop program for entering time, so I’m planning to use the phone version as soon as I get around to setting it up on my phone…

There are lots of other useful apps for legal work, especially if we start talking about apps in which one might do actual legal work, like Goodreader or Google Docs. But my goal here was to list some of the apps that I find useful for doing all that tangential, work-related stuff that we do in addition to, say, actual brief writing. Hope it’s helpful!

Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.

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