Estate Planning

Smartphones and the Legal Profession

By Hull and Hull LLP

There has been so much that has been recently written about the release of the iPad and more recently, the new iPhone 4G. Some may remember that an Apple Software Engineer who was working on the iPhone 4G accidentally forgot the Smartphone at a local bar, prior to its release date. Gizmodo, known as a leading technology weblog about consumer electronics, purchased the Smartphone from the finder and published exhaustive details about many of its new features, thereby stealing some of the thunder from the creators of the iPhone.

Smartphones are certainly the hottest thing going forward in social, business and technological circles, and its time for us to start thinking about the revolution it has had on our lives. 

Thanks to Smartphones, most lawyers are now mobile. I read an article in the most recent LawPRO magazine named 'Essential Smartphone apps for Lawyers'. For those of us who are not familiar with technological jargon, an app is short for 'application software', which is downloaded to a Smartphone. Some essential apps described in this article were: 'Documents To Go', which, among other things, allows lawyers to view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and 'Timr', another app referred to in this article, allows a lawyer to track their time and mileage. 

Smartphones have certainly made life convenient, but as lawyers it is scary to think about the privacy issues associated with all of the personal and client data that we store on them. With just a push of a button or a poke at the touchscreen, pretty much anyone who got hold of your phone could read your email, see pictures of you, your family etc. Smartphone's contain far more personal data than would ever have been accessible on older mobile phones, now coined as the 'dumbphones'.

Most of our privacy concerns can be remedied, which is as simple as enabling your security passcode, thereby locking your phone so that anyone who steals it or finds it if you have misplaced it cannot gain access.
 

Thank you for reading and have GREAT weekend,
 

Rick Bickhram
 

Full post as published by Toronto Estate Law Blog on June 18, 2010 (boomark / email).