Eversheds eschews BlackBerry in favour of iPad
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Eversheds has become the latest firm to embrace the Apple brand after it signed a deal to provide its lawyers with the company’s iPad.
The firm has launched a two-month pilot with around 50 members of its senior staff called Eversheds Anywhere, in which they will test out the trendy, but bulky, device. If the pilot is deemed successful all lawyers could get their own iPad.
Eversheds chief information officer Paul Caris said: “The iPad is an incredibly intuitive device which will be popular with our lawyers. We’re an innovative law firm and our lawyers are constantly on the move around the world. We want to provide clients with a quality and progressive service and our people with the most flexible working environment and believe that the new iPads and this groundbreaking collaboration will allow us to do that.”
Eversheds lawyers currently work with BlackBerry smartphones but a spokesperson pointed out that there’s “a lot you can’t do on Blackberry that you can do on an iPad. It’s got greater capacity, you can be in Asia and download precedents. It depends on what kind of lawyer you are, if you’re travelling a lot then it’s for you.”
However, the iPad is larger and heavier than the BlackBerry. The Apple product is typically 243mm long and weighs around 700g, compared with the Blackberry Bold 9700 model, which is 110mm and weighs approximately 120g.
The pilot is being funded equally by Eversheds and the two external IT companies the firm uses. The Eversheds spokesperson said that the initial investment was probably “in the thousands”.
This comes after US firm Morrison & Foerster became one of the first corporate law firms to launch its own iPhone application - MoFo2Go. The “app”, which is available as a free download, provides firm news and partner biographies (16 March 2010).
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Readers' comments (24)
Anon | 30-Jun-2010 2:45 pm
You can hardly slip an iPad in your shirt or jacket pocket, can you?
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Anonymous | 30-Jun-2010 3:21 pm
Much as I would like my firm to give me an iPad this is just gimmick PR isnt it? You could have an iPad AND a Blackberry but not an iPad instead of one (try holding it for any length of time), and on Eversheds profits I don't think they will shell out to give all the lawyers both somehow
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chris | 30-Jun-2010 3:25 pm
Need both, surely?
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Anon | 30-Jun-2010 3:42 pm
It's only going to get harder for the partners to pretend their paying attention during meetings.
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boris goodenough | 30-Jun-2010 3:43 pm
I think the Sheds are so trnedy that a jacket is out of the question. In the button down preppy world they would like to inhabit, this is "what it's all about".
Shame they don't spend more time worrying about eh quality of the legal advice they give, but that's SUCH an old-fashioned thing to do
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Anonymous | 30-Jun-2010 3:46 pm
I think the "shed" is forgetting about the crucial aspect of using a mobile device...the capability to be contactable by telephone. It looks like the firm is trying too hard to look trendy and wasting money when a good old iphone would have done the trick.
Mind you I guess the partners could waste even more time during meetings by showing off how many apps they each have on their ipads.
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Anonymous | 30-Jun-2010 3:47 pm
Who knew they were that desperate for publicity?
The iPad has already been shown to be fairly useless when it comes to editing documents, one of the main perceived advantages the device could be said to have over the blackberry.
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Anonymous | 30-Jun-2010 3:49 pm
In the US the BB has not been supplanted by the iPhone due to well documented security concerns. Presumably the same problems will apply to the iPad?
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Stephen | 30-Jun-2010 4:02 pm
It seems that you would still a phone with you though. I'm not ready to switch entirely to just email and twitter. It would seem to me that the best bet for a company that's just paid "in the thousands" for a pilot test of a new device would want to avoid spending anymore on phones. They've got a load of blackberries lying around, haven't they?
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Anonymous | 30-Jun-2010 4:03 pm
I'd be interested to know what level of security and manageabilty Eversheds is implementing. I can see an iPad as a replacement for a laptop but with no telephone and without RIM's comprehensive back-end management tools and end-to-end security I wouldn't be comfortable with it as a 'Berry replacement.
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