Apple Legal Customer Case Study

Link: Apple - Small Business - Small Practice, Big Presence.

Apple has finally restored a Legal Solutions section to their Business site. This story highlights a small firm in Ohio that switched to Macs -- the second page talks about how easy it is to create PDFs just using OS X, and to efile those PDFs. Apple hasn't tried to make many inroads to the legal market -- we've actually been small potatoes as a market segment -- but they should. It's a much bigger market than it appears to be. (If anybody from Apple reads this, contact me and I'll tell you why and how.)

I haven't written a lot yet about the Mac OS -- I use Windows at the office and Mac OS 10.3 at home/consulting -- but I am totally sold on its ability to handle pretty much every aspect of being a "PDF lawyer" right out of the box. In fact, I think that with the advent of the next version, OS X 10.4 "Tiger," I will construct a whole PDF efiling workflow (and possibly lit support system) using only what comes with the system. And it's gonna kick butt.

More on that later....
Dave

Comments

[William Wilson]

I'll look forward to seeing what you come up with. I'm a Mac-using attorney, a beacon of hope among all the Windows boxes in our firm.

[Tim Hadley]

I'm planning for my next computer purchase to be a Mac notebook. I haven't decided which one yet, and I have to establish the cash flow to make the purchase first. That's probably fine, as it keeps me from making an impulse purchase, and with any luck they'll be selling them with Tiger installed by the time I make my purchase.

I've been reading Ernie the Attorney's observations of life with Macs since he bought his PowerBook. I'm not too nervous about using a Mac in the Windows dominated world of law, and I'm more than enthusiastic at the prospect of a better overall user experience, easier configurability, better interfaces, and (I can scarcely contain my excitement) native PDF handling.

Here's a question. How easy is it to slurp data out of a PDF document back into an editable form? In the Windows world, there's Scansoft PDF Converter, which drags text out of PDF into a Word file. With PDFs that were generated directly, that works decently, and with scanned and OCR'ed PDFs, the output is often laughable (except when you need it in a hurry). How easily can one do that on the Mac? Just curious -- thanks in advance if you have the chance to respond.