LAWTECH: Geek gifts for the lawyer on your list

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The last of the leaves are off the trees, and though there’s no snow on the ground, it’s not far away.

T’is the season for my annual look at what’s hot on the gift list for techno-lawyers. After a completely unscientific poll of my legal colleagues and a healthy dose of my own bias, here are my 2011 recommendations.

Credit cards at the ready? Let’s hit it.

Apple iPad2 – This is the iPad’s second year at the number one spot. Go to any CLE and you’ll see a fair number of your fellow attorneys taking notes, capturing images and checking back with the office from their iPad tablets. The form factor, ease of use and long battery life are killer features of the iPad. If you do any presenting, the iPad2 can mirror its display to an external HDTV. It also runs version 5 of the iOS operating system, which is neatly integrated into Apple’s iCloud storage for your documents, media, calendar and other important things.

The jury is divided on whether to buy into the 3G wireless option. For people who are often away from wireless networks, it’s a $130 option (plus monthly charges) that makes a lot of sense. Those who are almost always within range of WiFi rarely wish they’d bought it. $500 – $830 at Apple.com.

iPhone 4S – The new iPhone 4S is a nice companion to the iPad2. It uses the same operating system and processor, so it’s incredibly fast. It also is neatly integrated with iCloud, and that makes it easy to use either device to access the same media and other documents.

The 4S also includes Siri, the iPhone speech synthesis and recognition system that you’ve probably seen ads for on television. It allows the iPhone to respond to voice commands, much like other phones. In addition, it recognizes natural speech without training and can answer questions based on your current location. It even takes dictation. $200-$400 with service plan at Apple.com.

IrisScan Anywhere 2 – The techno-lawyer on your list loves the ScanSnap 1500 at the office, but sometimes a lawyer’s work is away from the office. The IrisScan Anywhere 2 portable scanner fits neatly into a brief bag and can scan documents to PDF or JPG at 300 or 600 dpi. The best part is that you don’t need to plug it into a computer or into an outlet – it is self-contained with a rechargeable battery, and scans your documents to an SD card. Back at the office the scanner interfaces with Macs or PCs via the USB port. List price is $199, Amazon.com has it for $175.

Lilliput USB Monitor – The road warrior is tied to the laptop, and sometimes needs a little extra screen real estate for monitoring email or videoconferencing. Lugging around a second monitor isn’t an option unless it’s a tiny little 7” LCD monitor with an extra 800 x 480 pixels of real estate. The Lilliput USB monitor just plugs into your Mac or PC USB port and can be oriented vertically or horizontally. About $100 from Amazon.com and Thinkgeek.com.

Pogoplug – The Pogoplugs are hardware devices that let you set up a private cloud for storing files. Just plug the device into the wall and connect it to your network. Then plug your own USB storage devices (flash drives, hard drives, solid-state drives) into the Pogoplug device. You can then access the storage over the Internet as a mapped drive, or from a web browser. It’s kind of like using Dropbox, except instead of having your data who-knows-where, your data stays on your storage devices (the Pogoplug service indexes the content and communicates with your Pogoplug device, but doesn’t act as storage for your files).

There are apps for mobile devices that work with Pogoplug so you can access documents and stream media files from pretty much anywhere. The Pogoplug devices are much more power-efficient than a PC and consume just a few watts (there’s not even a power switch). Ultra-techno-lawyers will love the fact that these devices are actually tiny computers running Linux, and you can “shell” into the device and customize it. For the rest of us, it’s a pretty useful device right out of the box. $100-300 list price, depending on the model, with street prices running around half that (Buy.com, Amazon.com).

Solid State Drive – I suggested this last year and it’s still a game-changing upgrade for your laptop. If your techno-lawyer is still spinning rust and complaining about speed, you will be a hero. Solid state drives have no moving parts so they are not subject to the mechanical failures that can cause a traditional hard drive to crash. They are also generally noticeably faster than mechanical drives – this is a nice option to squeeze a little more performance out of a laptop.

As a bonus, since there are no moving parts, the laptop will run cooler and quieter. Prices vary depending on the vendor and the drive capacity; you can get a 120GB drive for around $180 at Buy.com.

Ron Phillips is a self-described attorney-computer nerd with more than 15 years of experience as a software architect and technology entrepreneur. He has helped to design and build enterprise systems for large and mid-size corporations, developed commercial software products and authored several books and articles concerning software development, applications and technology. He enjoys helping fellow attorneys with their technology questions one-on-one and on the Practice 411 forum, and looks forward to sharing his technology perspectives in this column. You can reach Ron at [email protected]

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